CRAY Colloquium: Scaling Serendipity: A SMART Framework for AI-Augmented Innovation

The computer science colloquium takes place on Mondays from 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. This week's speaker, Aniket Kittur (Carnegie Mellon University), will be giving a talk titled "Scaling Serendipity: A SMART Framework for AI-Augmented Innovation"

Abstract

Finding novel ideas and translating them into viable, impactful solutions is critical to solving the many complex problems faced by society today. However, this process of innovation is frequently impeded by cognitive and computational bottlenecks ranging from searching for ideas in distant fields to derisking and evaluating the viability of those ideas. This talk presents a framework that accelerates this process by strategically augmenting human ingenuity with artificial intelligence. Drawing upon over a decade of research in computational and crowd-augmented creativity, I will discuss approaches for: (1) decomposing analogical ideation to scale it beyond individual limits; (2) advances in exploring distant conceptual spaces, including using crowds, embeddings, and LLMs; and (3) going beyond ideation to transferring and evaluating early-stage concepts by partnering AI tools with deep, tacit knowledge from experts. I will present empirical results from studies in the lab as well as industry deployments demonstrating significant increases in the novelty and viability of generated concepts for individuals and teams. This work moves towards a future of accelerating innovation through systematized serendipity: a validated, scalable model for building a more predictable and disruptive R&D engine.

Biography

Aniket "Niki" Kittur is a Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His research on AI-augmented cognition looks at how we can accelerate knowledge acquisition and innovation by partnering human and machine intelligence. He has authored and co-authored over 100 papers, 17 of which have received best paper awards or honorable mentions. Dr. Kittur has been inducted into the CHI Academy, has received an NSF CAREER award, the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence, major research grants from NSF, NIH, Google, Microsoft, Bosch, and Toyota, and his work has been reported in venues including Nature News, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, TechCrunch, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He received a BA in Psychology and Computer Science at Princeton, and a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from UCLA.