Pietro Michelucci

Pietro Michelucci is president of the Human Computation Institute, a multidisciplinary innovation center that develops scalable, crowd-powered systems to address “wicked” societal problems. He is also a visiting professor at Cornell University in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering.

Pietro has a joint-PhD from Indiana University in cognitive science and mathematical psychology. He is interested in understanding how the complementary abilities of humans and machines could be used to build collective thinking systems that have futuristic AI capabilities today – an emerging field called “human computation”. Toward this end, he has studied Organismic Computing and Massively Distributed Problem Solving. More recently he is investigating complexity science as a way to make problem solving systems behave more predictably and effectively in the real world.

Pietro is Editor-in-Chief of the 2013 Springer Handbook of Human Computation and also of the journal Human Computation. Prior to founding the institute, Pietro spent ten years developing and executing multi-team, high risk/reward Artificial Intelligence programs for the U.S. government. In 2014, he led a CRA-sponsored national summit at the Wilson Center, which produced a research roadmap for Human Computation.

Pietro is frequently invited to speak about his work, which has received broad international coverage, including PBS, NPR's Science Friday, The Washington Post, Wired, Financial Times, and the BBC. He currently leads the Stall Catchers project, an online game that accelerates Alzheimer’s disease research and CrowdMeter, a technosocial intervention for COVID-19, as well as a new data science initiative called Civium.