This paper attempts to define a region where human computation belongs, including its definition and similar ideas. According to the paper’s quote from Von Ahn’s dissertation on human computation, it is defined as a way of solving a computation problem that a machine cannot yet handle. The paper compares human computation with crowdsourcing, social computing, and data mining and explain how they are similar but different. The paper continues to study the dimensions related to human computation, starting with motivation. These include factors such as pay, altruism, and joy. The next dimension that the paper discuss is quality control, the method of ensuring an above-threshold accuracy of human computation results. These included multi-response agreement, expert review, and automatic check. Then, the paper introduces how the gathered computations by many humans can be aggregated together to solve the ultimate problem. These included collection, statistical processing, improvement, and search. Finally, the paper discusses a few more small dimensions such as process order and task-request cardinality.
I enjoyed the paper’s attempt to generate a taxonomy for human computation which can be easily ill-defined. I think the paper did a good job at it by starting with the definition and breaking it down into major components. In the paper’s discussion about aggregation, it was interesting to me that they included “none”, which means the individual human computations by themselves are the major problem that the requester wants solved, and there is no need for aggregation of all the results. Another thing I found fascinating about the project was their mentioning of motivation for the humans performing the computation. Even though it is natural that people will not perform the tasks for nothing, it did not occur to me that this would be a major factor to consider when utilizing human computation. Of the list of possible motivations, I found altruism to be a humorous and unexpected category.
I was also reminded of a project that used human computation, called “Place” held in a community called Reddit, where a user of the community could place a colored pixel on a shared canvas once in a few minutes. The aggregation of human computation of “Place” would probably be considered as iterative improvement.
These are the questions that I could come up with while reading the paper:
1. The aggregation category “none” is very interesting, but I cannot come up with an immediate example. What would be a good case of utilizing human computation that doesn’t require aggregation of the results?
2. In the Venn diagram figure of the paper showing relationships between human computation, crowdsourcing, and social computing, what kind of problems would go into the region where all three overlap? This would be a problem where many people on the Internet with no explicit relation to each other socially interact and cooperate to perform computation that machines cannot yet do. The collected results may be aggregated to solve a larger problem.
3. Data mining was not considered a human computation because it was about an algorithm trying to discover information from data collected from humans. If humans sat together trying to discover information from data generated by a computer, would this be considered human computation?
