Human Computation and Crowdsourcing

Uichin LeeKSE652 Social Computing Systems

Design and Analysis

The Rise of CrowdsourcingBy Jeff Howe (Wired Magazine, 2006)

Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003.

The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare

cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R&D.

The Rise of Crowdsourcing

• The Professional• The Packager• The Tinkerer• The Masses• And the Age of the Crowd

The Professional

• A story of “Claudia Menashe”– A project director at the National

Health Museum in Washington, DC– Putting a series of interactive kiosks

devoted to potential pandemics like the avian flu

– An exhibition designer created a plan for the kiosk; now she wants to have images to accompany the text..• Hire a photographer?• Pre-existing images—stock photograph

The Professional

• She ran across a stock photo collection by Mark

I’ll give you some discount: how about

$100-$150 per photograph?

That’s about half of what a cooperate client would

pay!

Great! I’ll buy 4 images!!

We don’t have much money…

Claudia

Mark

The Professional

One dollar!! That’s a steal!!

iStockphoto: a marketplace for the work of amateur photographers (e.g., homemakers, students, engineers, dancers); over 20,000 contributors which charge about $1 to $5 per basic image

The Packager

• Viral videos; how to repurpose content to make compelling TV on a budget?

• Web Junk 20 at VH1: American television program in which VH1 and iFilm collaborate to highlight the twenty funniest and most interesting clips collected from the Internet that week

• Michael Hirschorn (creator of Web Junk 20)– “I knew we offered something YouTube couldn’t; television. Everyone

wants to be on TV”• Next generation TV: user generated content

– As user generated TV matures, the users will become more proficient and the networks better at ferreting out the best of the best..

• UGC everywhere; say in education, e.g., Khan Academy

The Tinkerer: The Future of Cooperate R&D

• InnoCentives – Launched in 2001 to connect with brainpower outside the company – Companies pay solvers anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 per solution– Jill Panetta (CSO) says

• More than 30% of the problems are solved! • The odds of a solver’s success increased in the fields in which they had no formal expertise• “The strength of weak ties”– Mark Granovetter

• Similar Services:

• Ed Melcarek– On most Saturdays, Melcarek attacks problems that have stumped some of the best

cooperate scientists at Fortune 100 companies– “not bad for a few weeks’ work” (e.g., Colgate problem: $25,000)

• P&G’s R&D: – “We have 9,000 people on our R&D staff and up to 1.5 million researchers working

through our external networks”

The Masses• The Turk:

– The first machine capable of beating a human at chess, built around the late 1760s by a Hungarian nobleman named Wolfgan von Kempelen

• Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – Crowdsourcing for the masse (no specific

talents required)– Web based marketplace that helps companies

to find people to perform “human intelligence tasks” (HITs) computers are lousy at

– Examples: identifying items in a photo, skimming real estate documents to find identifying information, writing short product description

– HITs cost from a few cents to a few dollars or more

“Human Intelligence inside”

Our focus : The Masses – Labor Marketplaces, Games, Ubiquitous Sensing, Social Networking/Q&A

The Age of the Crowd• Distributed computing projects: UC Berkeley’s SETI@home?

– Tapping into the unused processing power of millions of individual computers

• “Distributed labor networks”– Using the Internet (and Web 2.0) to exploit the spare processing power of

millions of human brains

• Successful examples?– Open source software: a network of passionate, geeky volunteers could write

code just as well as highly paid developers at Microsoft or Sun Microsystems– Wikipedia: creating a sprawling and surprisingly comprehensive online

encyclopedia– eBay, Facebook: can’t exist without the contributions of users

The Age of the Crowd

• The productive potential of millions of plugged-in enthusiasts is attracting the attention of old-line business too

• For the last decade or so, companies have been looking overseas for cheap labor

• But now it doesn’t matter where the laborers are, as long as they are connected to the Internet

The Age of the Crowd

• Technological advances in everything (from product design software to digital video cameras) are breaking down the cost barriers that once separated amateurs from professionals

• Crowds (e.g., hobbyists, part-timers, dabblers) now suddenly have a market for their efforts

• Smart companies in industries tap the latent talent of the crowd

“The labor isn’t always free, but it costs a lot less than paying traditional employees. It’s not outsourcing: it’s crowdsourcing”

Human Computation: A Survey and Taxonomy of a Growing Field

Alexander J. Quinn, Benjamin B. Bederson CHI 2011

Human Computation

• Computer scientists (in the artificial intelligence field) have been trying to emulate human like abilities, e.g., language, visual processing, reasoning using computers

• Alan Turing wrote in 1950: “The idea behind digital computers may be explained by

saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer.”

• L. Von Ahn 2005 wrote a doctorial thesis about human computation

• The field is now thriving: business, art, R&D, HCI, databases, artificial intelligence, etc.

Definition of Human Computation

• Dates back 1938 in philosophy and psychology literature; 1960 in Computer Science literature (by Turing)

• Modern usage inspired by von Ahn’s 2005 dissertation titled by “Human Computation”– “…a paradigm for utilizing human processing

power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve.”

Definition of Human Computation• “…the idea of using human effort to perform tasks that computers cannot yet

perform, usually in an enjoyable manner.” (Law, von Ahn 2009)• “…a new research area that studies the process of channeling the vast internet

population to perform tasks or provide data towards solving difficult problems that no known efficient computer algorithms can yet solve” (Chandrasekar, et al., 2010)

• “…a technique that makes use of human abilities for computation to solve problems.” (Yuen, Chen, King, 2009)

• “…a technique to let humans solve tasks, which cannot be solved by computers.” (Schall, Truong, Dustdar, 2008)

• “A computational process that involves humans in certain steps…” (Yang, et al., 2008)

• “…systems of computers and large numbers of humans that work together in order to solve problems that could not be solved by either computers or humans alone” (Quinn, Bederson, 2009)

• “…a new area of research that studies how to build systems, such as simple casual games, to collect annotations from human users.” (Law, et al., 2009)

Related Ideas

• Crowdsourcing• Social computing• Data mining• Collective intelligence

Crowdsourcing• “Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a

designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.” (Jeff Howe)

• Human computation replaces computers with humans, whereas crowdsourcing replaces traditional human workers with members of the public– HC: replacement of computers with humans– CS: replacement of insourced workers with crowdsourced workers

• Some crowdsourcing tasks can be considered as human computation tasks– Hiring crowdsourced workers for translation jobs : – Machine translation (fast, but low quality) vs. human translation (slow, high

quality)

Social Computing• Definition from Wikipedia:

– “.. supporting any sort of social behavior in or through computational systems” (e.g., blogs, email, IM, SNS, wikis, social bookmarking)

– “.. Supporting computations that are carried out by groups of people” (e.g., collaborative filtering, online auctions, prediction markets, reputation systems)

• Some other definitions:– “… applications and services that facilitate collective action and social

interaction online with rich exchange of multimedia information and evolution of aggregate knowledge…” (Parameswaran, Whinston, 2007)

– “… the interplay between persons' social behaviors and their interactions with computing technologies” (Dryer, Eisbach, Ark, 1999)

Data Mining

• Data mining is defined broadly as the application of specific algorithms for extracting patterns from data.” (Fayyad, Piatetsky-Shapiro, Smyth, 1996)

• While data mining deals with human created data, it does not involve human computation– Google PageRank “only” uses human created data

(links)

Collective Intelligence

• Overarching notion: large groups of loosely organized people can accomplish great things by working together– Traditional study focused on “decision making

capabilities by a large group of people”• Taxonomical “genome” of collective intelligence– “… groups of individuals doing things collectively that

seem intelligent” (Malone, 2009)• Collective intelligence generally encompasses

human computation and social computing

Relationship Diagram

CollectiveIntelligence

Data Mining

CrowdsourcingSocial

Computing

HumanComputation

Classifying Human Computation• Motivation

– What does motivate people to perform HC? • Human skill

– What kinds of human skills do HC tasks require?• Aggregation

– How to combine results of HC tasks? • Quality control

– How to control quality of the results of HC tasks?• Processing order of different roles

– Roles (requester, worker, computer)• Task-request cardinality

– Requester vs. Worker cardinality

MotivationMotivation Examples

Pay (financial rewards) Mechanical Turk (online labor marketplace), ChaCha (mobile Q&A), LiveOps (a distributed call center)

Altruism (just helping other people for good) helpfindjim.com (Jim Gray), Naver KiN, Yahoo! Answer

Enjoyment (fun) Game With A Purpose (GWAP): http://www.gwap.com - ESP Game, Tag a Tune,

Reputation (recognition) Volunteer translators at childrenslibrary.org , Naver KiN, Yahoo! Answer

Implicit work reCAPTCHA

Quality ControlQuality Control Examples

Output agreement ESP Game (a game for labeling images) – answer is accepted if the pair agree on the same answer

Input agreementTag-a-tune: two humans are listening to different inputs (music). They are asked to describe the music and try to decide whether they are looking at the same music or different music

Economic modelsWhen money is a motivating factor; some economic models can be used to elicit quality answers (e.g., game-theoretic model of the worker’s rating to reduce the incentive to cheat)

Defensive task design Design tasks so that it’s difficult to cheat (e.g., comprehension questions)

Redundancy Each task is given to multiple people to separate the wheat from the chaff

Statistical filtering Filter or aggregate the data in some way that removes the effects of irrelevant work

Multilevel review One set of workers does the work; the second set reviews the results and rates the quality (e.g., Soylent : find-fix-verity)

Automatic check fold.it (protein folding game); easy to check using computer, but hard to find answers

Reputation system Motivated to provide quality answers by a reputation scoring systems; Mechanical Turk, Naver KiN, etc.

Expert check Trusted expert skims or cross-checks results for relevance and apparent accuracy

Aggregation

Aggregation Examples

Collection (to build a knowledge base)

Artificial intelligence research; to build large DB of common sense facts (e.g., people can’t brush their hairs with a table)Examples: ESP game, reCAPTCHA, FACTory, Verbosity, etc.

Wisdom of crowds (statistical processing of data)

Average guess of normal people can be very close to the actual outcome; e.g., Ask500people, News Futures, Iowa Electronic Markets

SearchLarge number of volunteers to sift through photos or videos, searching for some desired scientific phenomenon, person, or object, e.g., helpfindjim.com, Stardust@home project

Iterative improvement Giving answers of previous worker to elicit better answers, e.g., MonoTrans

Active learning Classifier training; selects the samples that could potentially give best training benefits and select them for manual annotations for training

Genetic algorithm (search/optimization) Free Knowledge Exchange, PicBreeder

None (if independent task is performed) VizWiz (a mobile app that les a blind user take a photo and ask question)

Human Skills, Processing Order, Task-Request Cardinality

Human Skills ExamplesVisual recognition ESP GameLanguage understanding SoylentBasic human communication ChaCha

Processing Order Examples

Computer Worker (>> Requester) reCAPTCHA

Worker (player) Requester Computer (aggregation) ESP Game (image labeling)

Computer Worker Requester ComputerCyc inferred large # of common senses FACTory, a GWAP where worker (players solve problem) , Cyc performs aggregation

Requester Worker Mechanical Turk

Task-Request Cardinality ExamplesOne-to-one (one worker to one task) ChaChaMany-to-many (many workers to many tasks) ESP GameMany-to-one (many workers to one task) helpfindjim.com (Jim Gary)Few-to-one (few workers to one task) VizWiz

Summary

• Definition of human computation and crowdsourcing

• Relationship with other related issues• Classifying human computation and

crowdsourcing systems– Motivation, human skill, aggregation, quality

control, processing order, task-request cardinality– Nature of collaboration, architecture, recruitment,

human skill