Artificial Intelligence and Networks for a Sustainable Future: Connecting Species (Contributions to Economics)

This book examines the revolutionary impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on communication and collaboration. In recent years, advances in large language models and deep learning have enabled seamless human communication across diverse languages and even with other species, such as dogs and humpback whales. AI is also unlocking the language of plants, including tomatoes and the 'wood wide web.'

The book explores how technologies in natural language processing, image recognition, audio analysis, and network analysis facilitate unprecedented fuzzy data analysis. This progress is crucial for promoting sustainability and addressing climate change by uncovering patterns in complex environmental data that inform sustainable practices and policies. The book further focuses on studying interspecies communication, where AI technologies decode communication patterns between humans and other species, allowing a better understanding of the natural world. It highlights how plants can capture human emotions, enhancing well-being and productivity.

Presenting empirical applications and case studies, the book analyzes societal, economic, and ecological implications, advancing theoretical insights, and introducing innovative methods. It will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience of scholars, students, and researchers in the social sciences, economics, business, sociology, psychology, environmental studies, and media and communication who are interested in a deeper understanding of how artificial intelligence and interspecies communication can contribute to building a sustainable future. 

Francesca Greco, PhD, PsyD, is Associate Professor of Sociology of Cultural Processes and Communication at the University of Udine, Italy, where she teaches Public Relations and Advertising Communication. She is a member of the Doctoral School in Sociology of Health at Magna Graecia University of Catanzaro and of the School of Specialization in Health Psychology at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. She serves on the board of Research Network 16 (Sociology of Health and Medicine) of the European Sociological Association and on the Scientific Committee of JADT (Statistical Analysis of Textual Data). She is also a former expert on organ donation for the Sociology of Health and Medicine Section of the Italian Sociological Association. Her research interests include social science research methods, big data, computational sociology, and natural language processing. She developed the socio-cultural profiling method Emotional Text Mining, which has received awards in Italy and France.

Andrea Fronzetti Colladon, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Business Leadership and Intelligence and Head of the Business and Collective Intelligence Lab at Roma Tre University in Italy. He has been Visiting Professor at the Department of Management of Kozminski University and Visiting Scholar at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. In his research, Prof. Fronzetti Colladon combines methods from network science, natural language processing, and machine learning with theories from the social sciences, psychology, humanities, and linguistics to advance knowledge and discovery about management and human behavior. He is the instructor of several courses on Social Network Analysis, Text Mining, Business Analytics, and Change Management, and the author of more than 100 scientific publications. His work has been featured in magazines and newspapers such as Harvard Business Review, Psychology Today, Il Sole 24 Ore, Il Messaggero, and Warsaw Business Journal.

Peter A. Gloor is an Honorary Professor at the University of Cologne, Germany, and a Research Affiliate at the MIT System Design Management Program. Until April 2024 he was a Research Scientist at the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT's Sloan School of Management. He leads research projects focusing on using Artificial Intelligence (AI) for interspecies communication, collaborative innovation networks, and happiness. Gloor further is the founder and Chief Creative Officer of the software companies galaxyadvisors AG and Fauna-AI. He previously taught at Universidad Cattolica in Santiago de Chile, Aalto University Helsinki, Finland, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy, University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW) and University of Applied Sciences Lucerne (HSLU), Switzerland. Earlier he was a partner with PwC and Deloitte, where he was head of eBusiness Europe, and the section leader for software engineering at UBS. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and was a Post-Doc at the MIT Lab for Computer Science.