Two SBS research assistants with the Bayesian Argumentation via Delphi (BARD) project attended and presented at two conferences in June.
In January 2017, Professor George Wright, along with colleagues Dr Fergus Bolger and Dr Gene Rowe, and colleagues at both Monash University in Melbourne, University College London, and Birkbeck, secured a $15 million grant from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) which is part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), to test and build the Bayesian Argumentation via Delphi (BARD) system. The focus of the BARD system is on improving reasoning amongst intelligence analysts
Megan (Crawford) Grime is in her final year of her PhD and is a Senior Research Assistant with the BARD project on the Strathclyde-based Delphi team. She attended the 2nd Annual Risk & Uncertainty Conference (RUC), held in the School of Medical Sciences at Vrije Universiteit Medical Center, in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Megan presented this past year's discoveries from BARD's Delphi team.
The Delphi team - so named because it makes use of the Delphi technique, an iterative survey method to reduce biases in group problem solving - has been designing and conducting a series of studies measuring the effects of different problem decomposition efforts in conjunction with Delphi on reasoning quality on complex problems involving competing hypotheses and uncertain evidence.
At the RUC, Megan showed how the Delphi team discovered not just one, but several effective methods that help both groups and individual participants break down complex problems and identify key components necessary for reaching solutions. Megan was also able to present the Delphi team's novel approach to studying group reasoning processes, the Simulated Group Response Paradigm (SGRP). The SGRP permits the rigorous investigation of influences on group reasoning without the need for real, interacting groups with their attendant logistic problems and lack of experimental control. Read Megan's abstract here, "Applying the Simulated Group Response Paradigm to Investigations of Delphi and Problem Decomposition Effects on Reasoning about Hypotheses using Uncertain Evidence".
Alexandrina Vasilichi, one of BARD’s newest, and youngest, Research Assistants, attended the Behavioural Science Online 2018 Conference hosted by UCL Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, in London. This academic conference included a session which introduced some of the key advantages and challenges of running experiments online and some helpful tools. More specifically, various tools were presented for designing online experiments, various ways of recruiting participants for online studies and effective strategies for securing data quality in online experiments. The afternoon session presented various applications of online methods, such as doing multi-person interactive social cognition studies and online data collection in health psychology research.
Given today's prolific use of online platforms to host surveys and experiments, such conversations on the use and improvements of online technologies should be a regular presence in arguably all academic departments.
As the BARD project transitions into the next phase of the project, the Delphi team will be exploring further methods for improving group decision-making qualities. Along with this transition, the team looks to submit a number of papers to the fields of Risk & Uncertainty, Judgment & Decision Making, and Forecasting.