Guidelines
A competition among students for ideas to improve digital models of cells and organisms

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This competition is the First Round of an effort to improve human scientific collective intelligence in the age of AI.

 

Details and background information are available at:

https://www.cellcomm.org/ai-and-collective-intelligence

 

In the First Round a prize of $1,000 for the best student of each participating Institution will be awarded. The prize money has been donated by scientists, but the winners will be chosen by the participant groups themselves. If less than 3 students participate for any Institution the students will form a combined group that will be eligible for the same prize.

 

This competition is open to students of every discipline and can include both biological details and proposals on how to improve the social and information-exchange aspects of human collective intelligence.

 

All ideas will be openly shared on the cellcomm.org website and individual recognition will be provided by peers and by senior scientists. The platform is intended to be community-owned, as the best way to ensure broad participation. You are encouraged to suggest how to design it so that it benefits all. The history of Wikipedia shows that open content, allowing the possibility of a fork (an alternative version of the website), contributed to keep it as a non-profit initiative.

 

When discussing the design of the effort you might consider potential concerns:

- Many have discussed the resistance to innovation in science, including Joel Mokyr (2025 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences) and Bernard Barber, in a highly cited paper. They suggested that this "fear of novelty" is a general human feature, only in part counteracted by the methods of science. The history of the PDB is a recent example where a change in scientific culture was adopted only after a slow process.

- A concern for some could be the fear of being wrong, which Stanley Crooke called in his interview the fear of looking stupid. We encourage brainstorming with humans and AIs, learning from the achievements of our mathematical colleagues. Brainstorming requires sharing tentative ideas and participants will therefore commit not to criticize individuals.

- Another current fear is that of being deceived by people or agents who are not who they say they are, especially when interacting online. It might help to grow by progressively including institutions where at least one scientist is known by the participants.

 

The initiative will complement other ongoing efforts in this field. It will help provide the data, knowledge and societal support they need.

 

The following are examples of possible appropriate submissions, but you should feel free to contribute anything fostering the general aim of the initiative:

- Investigate how work on a problem you are studying can be extended to be part of a larger cell or organism model, beyond what you or your lab could do.

- Identify what is not known within a field or sub-field and suggest methods that could be used to fill these gaps.

- Reflect on how to motivate the participation of scientists in a broad collective effort, preserving individual creativity, and how to address their concerns. Contributions are welcome from scholars from social and humanistic disciplines. Scientists addressing biological details are encouraged to include a paragraph on these aspects of collective intelligence, to ensure that the discussion of this topic is grounded in their experience.

 

Please submit your ideas here

or send them by email to info(at)cellcomm.org (we will upload them on the site), including your name, email and Institution.

 

We expect that in the first round most contributions will consist of approximately one page of text. Other formats are acceptable if you provide a reason for it.

If you use AI please provide as supplementary material full details of any AI interactions, including models used, prompts and responses. This will help the community to learn about the most effective AI brainstorming techniques. Every participant will be offered the chance to contribute to a scientific report analyzing the most effective brainstorming methods.

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The deadline for submission is December 21st, 2026. It might be natural to submit close to the deadline, but submitting early will increase your chance of getting priority recognition for your ideas. To encourage early discussions, we allow the submission of multiple versions. All the versions will be preserved with a dated record but only the last version will be considered for the competition.

 

Intellectual courage is required to address the unique challenge human science is facing in the age of artificial intelligence. We should not be afraid of changing the forms of our culture, so that the values of science can stay the same.

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