Reflect! Lab

Reflect! Lab: Create, ReviseThe Reflect! Lab develops technologies that support reflective deliberation in teams and self-correcting reasoning.

Projects

  • GuiFi: Guidance for Finding Solutions to Contested Problems
  • Reflect! Platform (defunct)

GuiFi: Guidance for Finding Solutions to Contested Problems

GuiFi connects people who want to find solutions to contested problems. Users can join groups or set up their own group and invite others. GuiFi supports deliberation by

  • dividing the process into a sequence of steps that starts with finding agreement on what the problem exactly is and how it should be formulated (or framed)
  • guidance for building trust
  • guidance for dealing with conflicts and disagreements

This project is motivated by the assumption that it is possible to create platforms that

  • transform competitive into collaborative behavior
  • provide opportunities to train the skills and attitudes needed to engage in constructive deliberation about societal challenges
  • foster collaborative problem-solving skills

The project is still in development.

Lead

Michael Hoffmann, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy

Students

Evelyn Chen, Adam Bouamrani, Sanjay Maddala, Sandra Tan, Janelle Peters

Reflect! Platform (defunct)

The Reflect! Platform facilitated collaboration on wicked problems. Wicked problems are complex problems whose complexity results from the fact that they can be framed in a number of different ways, depending on who is looking at them. Stakeholders frame wicked problems differently depending on their interests, needs, values, worldviews, and background knowledge. Our ability to cope with wicked problems—and with the conflicts they usually create—is crucial for consensus building in the political and corporate world, and for any task that requires collaboration among people with different backgrounds. Reflect! could be used in problem-based learning projects (especially in ethics and social science education), by teams of professionals, and by stakeholders in controversies—both in face-to-face deliberation and online.

The development of the Reflect! Platform was supported by a grant for “Fostering self-correcting reasoning with reflection systems” from NSF’s Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies program (2016 – 2020, Award 1623419), and by two grants from the Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center in Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College (Aug 2016 – Dec 2017; Aug 2018 – May 2019).

Faculty

Graduate Research Assistants

Sanaz Ahmadzadeh Siyahrood (2023 – 2024); Philip Abel (2018 – 2019); DeAnna Brown (2017); Benjamin Staver (2016).

Students

Joshua Dwire, John Golden, Michelle Chiu, TJ Eneh, Sruti Guhathakurta, Shourya Khare, Sanskriti Rathi, Sally Hannoush, Minju Kwon, Savannah Quinn, Kexin Zhang, Phuc Huynh, Richard Aaron Jeng, Divya Yagnamurthy, Gauranshu Sharma, Sofia Davalos, Nia Alston Hall, Anamica Menon, Mary Alsayar, Angelina Suwoto, Theresa Hsieh, Kishan Chudasama, Ermelinda Izihirwe, Sheryl Ratnam, Tiana Hom, Horace Yao, Sophia De Lurgio, Yang Zhang, Zhao Chen, Aurian Fassih, Katerina Addington, Katherine Shen, Sarah Coltrain, Brian Taesung Lee, Sushree Pani, Tamara Ivina, Tejas Veedhulur, Silas Ever, Heldana Afework, Chisuso Eresia-Eke, Anjoulie Alhaj, Alan Huynh, Duc Nguyen, Najma Noor, Tuan Cai, Keefe Oentoro, Yiwei Wang, Ahmad Parker, Rishita Deshmukh, Ayane Yokoya, Reshma Gudla, Swathi Narasimhan, Nityam Bhachawat, Rohan Movva, Aditya Gupta, Angel Yang, Lucky Sharma, Hyeran Park, Ethan Curnow, Yashvini Deva, Swathi Narasimhan, Alyssa Nomura, Kevin Barron, Ava Healy, Eden Lin, Sean Jung, Ben Mingoia, Abigayle Kankolenski, Roland Saavedra, Nalini Dutt, Serene Belhadj, Jude Akram Hasan, Mei Li, Adva Oshri, Kevin Ma, Nefetari Joseph, Saad Bahlouli, Adam Bouamrani, Miguel Hulyalkar.