Thomas W. Malone

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Thomas W. Malone

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Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. At MIT, he is also a Professor of Information Technology and a Professor of Work and Organizational Studies. Previously, he was the founder and director of the MIT Center for Coordination Science and one of the two founding codirectors of the MIT Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century. Malone teaches classes on organizational design, information technology, and leadership, and his research focuses on how new organizations can be designed to take advantage of the possibilities provided by information technology.

Malone predicted in an article published in 1987 many of the major developments in electronic business over the following 25 years, including electronic buying and selling for many kinds of products. In 2004, Malone summarized two decades of his research in his critically acclaimed book, The Future of Work. His newest book, Superminds, appeared in May 2018. Malone has also published over 100 articles, research papers, and book chapters. He is the coeditor of four books.

Malone has been a cofounder of four software companies and has consulted and served as a board member for a number of other organizations. He is also an inventor with 11 patents.

His background includes work as a research scientist at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a PhD from Stanford University, an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich, and degrees in applied mathematics, engineering, and psychology.

 

Honors

Malone receives award from U.S. Presidential Scholars Foundation

September 24, 2024

Best paper award presented to Malone and co-authors

December 22, 2023

Malone named as Honorary Fellow of Argentinian Engineers Center

Publications

"When Combinations of Humans and AI are Useful: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis."

Vaccaro, Michelle, Abdullah Almaatouq, and Thomas Malone. Nature Human Behaviour. Forthcoming.

"Supermind Design for Inventing Smarter Organizations: Applying a New Organizational Design Approach in a Professional Services Setting."

Laubacher, Robert, Annalyn Bachman, Kathleen Kennedy, and Thomas W. Malone, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6961-23. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, December 2023.

"DesignAID: Using Generative AI and Semantic Diversity for Design Inspiration."

Alice Cai, Steven R. Rick, Jennifer Heyman, Yanxia Zhang, Alexandre Filipowicz, Matthew K. Hong, Matthew Klenk, and Thomas W. Malone. In CI '23: Proceedings of The ACM Collective Intelligence Conference, Delft, Netherlands: November 2023.

"Editorial to the Inaugural Issue of Collective Intelligence."

Flack, Jessica, Panos Ipeirotis, Thomas W. Malone, Geoff Mulgan, and Scott E. Page. Collective Intelligence, August 2022.

"Supermind Design for Responding to Covid-19: A Case Study of University Students Generating Innovative Ideas for a Societal Problem."

Koppineni, Akhilesh, David Sun Kong, and Thomas W. Malone, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6569-22. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, February 2022.

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AI Expert Spotlight: Tom Malone

“We’re looking for innovative ways to combine people and computers by taking advantage of what each does best,” says Tom Malone.

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Press

Humans and AI: Do they work better together or alone?

“When Combinations of Humans and AI Are Useful” is the first large-scale meta-analysis conducted to better understand when human-AI combinations are useful in task completion, and when they are not.

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Press Source: The New York Times

8 MIT AI experts to know now

We asked 8 MIT Sloan faculty members about their new projects and what they see as the most exciting — and concerning — aspects of the AI boom.

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