Madrid Colab

About Madrid Colab

In 2018 the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence began a joint effort with Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) in order to set up the Spanish digital platform CoLab.upm, based on the Climate CoLab platform. CoLab.upm aims to change how people and organizations massively collaborate and co-create transformative challenges, projects and conversations. 

In March 2020, in the context of the COVID19 crisis, UPM launched El Día Después Será, an incubator of transformative partnerships. Since then, this initiative has been using CoLab.upm to learn from the current crisis and transform lessons into concrete actions to accelerate change towards the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. 

Within the framework of the MIT-Spain Seed Funds, MIT and UPM are working together to gain ground on understanding, designing and implementing how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can augment Collective Intelligence in different human activities and societal systems. Collective Intelligence is key to address the challenges that current and future societies face and AI is becoming necessary to deal with the increasing complexity of human activities and societal systems. Our vision is that AI will only achieve its full potential when embedded in human-machine systems: “superminds”. 

Through this lens, we are heading for an AI-powered CoLab-based system to enable collaborative knowledge generation and action for systemic transformation that drive us towards more sustainable and resilient cities.