The fragmentation of science, the imminent need for reskilling the workforce, the inability of people to discern and vote for what is in their own interests, and unequal access to educational and knowledge infrastructure: all of these are urgent symptoms demonstrating the failure of our knowledge ecosystem to support human learning and decision making. While the amount of information available on the internet continues to grow, it is becoming harder for any single person to process all the information that could be useful to making a good decision, whether it is a patient deciding what to do about a cancer diagnosis or a shopper deciding which digital camera to buy. We collectively spend one trillion hours worldwide — more than 1/10th of all labor hours — trying to make decisions from content spread across many different web pages, with nearly all of that effort lost as no one else benefits (and the original individual themselves soon forgetting what they learned). Imagine instead a new internet platform in which anyone interested in a topic does not have to start learning from scratch, because the systems they use capture and share the work that they and others people do as they build their understanding. Such an ecosystem, accessible by anyone with an internet connection, would create a virtuous cycle of increasingly knowledgeable scientists, skilled workers, and literate citizens.
Ultimately, such a model of shared intellectual work will create a new paradigm for interacting with online information: compared with the first paradigm of simply reading (i.e., after typing in a URL), or the second of finding (i.e., using search engines returning unstructured lists of pages or simple facts), this new third paradigm will support understanding — helping a user acquire the mental structures needed to solve their problems.
Over the past 10 years we have demonstrated the promise of capturing and reinvesting the work people do while searching and browsing online in both academia (70+ papers, 14 best paper awards) and in the real world (tech transfer to Bosch, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, etc.). But as we showed the promise of this approach, we also identified a fundamental barrier to its adoption in the real world, analogous to the “cold start” problem found in many social systems: without enough initial users and the processing they provide, using the system is initially perceived as less valuable than just starting from scratch. This barrier is a major reason why existing companies (e.g., Google, Microsoft, IBM) continue to focus on simple fact-finding searches (e.g., how many baseball teams there are, what is the weather) with billions invested in incremental advancements such as task assistants and chatbots — while leaving people to do the hard work of knowledge synthesis and creation themselves.
This Center aims to bring together researchers, developers, designers, and entrepreneurs to break this barrier, kickstarting a new platform that will be immediately useful to individuals making sense of information online while simultaneously capturing the work they do to grow its reach. In the short term, this platform will help people find, extract, and synthesize information for themselves across multiple sources on a variety of devices ranging from smartphones to desktops. In the long term this platform will be the foundation of a virtuous cycle of distributed sensemaking, moving the web from a pattern of increasing fragmentation to one of increasing synthesis as more people use it. Not only will the platform be transformative in real world impact, but the data it generates will enable fundamental breakthroughs in diverse fields including natural language processing, knowledge synthesis, AI, decision making, and information seeking, and provide opportunities for analysis and experimentation at scale — without requiring researchers to leave for closed environments such as Google or Facebook. The platform will also help connect and catalyze latent strengths in HCI, AI, and data science in both academia and industry, generating research breakthroughs as well as spinout companies, licensing, and partnerships.
The Center for Knowledge Acceleration 
