Mission

Computational analysis is significantly impacting the way groups, organizations, and societies are managed and organizational decisions and policies evaluated. Research in the computational organizational area is re-shaping the way we think about organizational design, learning and adaptation. Improved measures of organizational design and performance are being developed. Computational models of organizations are starting to be used as consulting tool to address via what-if analysis, how organizational performance and effectiveness might be altered by potential changes such as re-engineering of the task, restructuring of the corporate hierarchy, adoption of new technologies, or changes in the communication structure. New meta-languages for developing models of organizations as interacting intelligent agents are being developed.

Groups, organizations, and societies are inherently computational and computational multi-agent systems are inherently organizational. Thus, within CASOS we attempt to understand and formally model two distinct but complimentary types of phenomena. The first is the natural or human group, organizational or society, which is universally formatted and continually acquires, manipulates, and produces information (and possibly other material goods) through the joint, and interlocked activities of people and automated information technologies. The second is the artificial computational systems which is generally comprised of multiple distributed agents who can mutually influence, constrain and support each other as they try to manage and manipulate the knowledge, communication and interaction networks in which they are embedded. Computational analysis is used to develop a better understanding of the fundamental principles of organizing, coordinating, and managing multiple information processing agents (whether they are human, WebBot, or robots) and the fundamental dynamic nature of groups, organizations and societies.

Within CASOS, computational analysis is not simply in service to organizational and social theorizing; rather, computational theorizing about these human phenomena is actually pushing the research envelope in terms of computational tools and techniques. CASOS research makes contributions to mainstream artificial intelligence and computer science by fostering progress on such issues as: large scale qualitative simulation, comparison and extension of optimization procedures (particularly procedures suited to extremely complex and possibly changing performance surfaces); aggregation and disaggregation of distributed objects; coordination algorithms; organizational and multiagent learning; and understanding and managing the trade off between agent quantity and computational complexity.

Research in this area requires further development of the scientific infrastructure including developing the following: easy-to-use cost-effective computational tool kits for designing and building computational models of organizations, teams, and social systems (e.g., a multi-agent oriented language with built in task objects and communication); multi-agent logics; intelligent tools for analyzing computational models; validation procedures, protocols, and canonical data sets and task descriptions; managerial decision aids based on computational organizational models; and protocols and standards for inter-agent communication.

'Key concerns in this area center around determining the following items: what coordinational structures are best for what types of agents (human, robots, or WebBot) and tasks; the advantages and disadvantages of using hybrid models (such as a joint annealer and genetic programming model) for exploring organizational issues and for locating new organizational designs; representations for, and management of, uncertainty in organizational systems; the interactions among, and the relative disadvantages of various types of adaptation, evolution, learning, and flexibility; measures of organizational design; the existence of, or limitations of, fundamental principles of organizing the trade offs for system performance of task-based, agent-based, and structure-based coordination schemes; representations for information and communication technology in computational models; and the relation between distributed semantics, knowledge and metal models on teamwork, organizational culture and performance.

At Carnegie Mellon:

CASOS aims to foster multidisciplinary research on high impact projects in a number of ways:

  • Identify and support new directions and unexploited synergies within the CMU community by linking the social and organizational community and the engineering and computer science community.
  • Provide a forum for disseminating new results both within and beyond Carnegie Mellon.
  • Provide an interface to industry and government for multidisciplinary work that combines social and computational analysis.
  • Enhance graduate education by providing a multidisciplinary education and research infrastructure.
  • CASOS brings together Carnegie Mellon faculty who are interested in examining social and organizational systems as computational entities.

More than 12 faculty and 9 students from 5 colleges are working in this area.

  • H & SS
  • Heinz School of Public Policy and Management (Heinz)
  • Graduate School of Industrial administration (GSIA)
  • School of Computer Science (SCS)
  • College of Engineering (CIT)

Researchers in this area are working to:

  1. Develop new concepts, theories, and knowledge about organizing and organization, coordination, adaptation, and evolution.
  2. Develop tools and procedures for the validation and analysis of computational models of distributed agent systems at the group, organization, and social level.
  3. Develop simulation and network based tools and metrics that can be used in the workplace to better manage the interlocked activities of people and intelligent technologies at the interaction and knowledge level.

CASOS areas of specialization:

  • Distributed Artificial Intelligence
  • Computational Organizational Theory
  • Computational Social Science
  • Computational Economics
  • Social and Organizational Networks