How to brainstorm brilliant ideas in teams without sliding into ‘groupthink’

Phys.org  May 13, 2022 Researchers at the University of Illinois explore the creative process in the context of higher education, advertising and leadership and offer some concrete ways to facilitate idea generation, both individually and in groups. Research shows that groups with diverse disciplines, backgrounds, beliefs, knowledge, and skills produce the strongest, most unique results. According to the researchers it is important to carefully define the challenge, task or problem including gathering key data and outlining boundaries, and any other constraints. Establishing three key guidelines is essential: Focus on the quantity of ideas generated, not their quality; Avoid criticism, judgment, […]

Sound waves bypass visual limitations to recognize human activity

Phys.org  May 28, 2019 For human activity recognition (HAR) one or a few ultrasonic sensors are used to receive signals, which require many feature quantities of extraction from the received data to improve recognition accuracy. An international team of researchers (China, Japan) has developed a device based on a two-dimensional acoustic array and convolutional neural networks which uses a single feature quantity to characterize the sound of human activities and identify them. They tested their approach using a two-dimensional acoustic array with 256 receivers and four ultrasonic transmitters to gather data related to four different human activities—sitting, standing, walking and […]

Army scientists develop computational model to predict human behavior

Science Daily  October 24, 2018 To determine collective group behavior emerging from the dynamic behavior of individuals, researchers at the US Army Research Laboratory have developed a model bypassing time-consuming calculations and represent the sought-for sensitivity in a single parameter to show how an individual adapts to group behavior. They focused on constructing and interpreting the output of large-scale computer models of complex dynamic networks from which collective properties such as swarming, collective intelligence and decision making could be determined. In tests the model showed that the analytic solution to this new kind of equation coincides with the predictions of the […]