Summary:
In this paper, the authors detail the emergence of Human Computation as a new area for research. They provide a solid definition of area’s constitution as:
- The problems fit the general paradigm of computation, and as such might someday be solvable by computers.
- The human participation is directed by the computational system or process.
They further solidify the definition by comparing it with other similar fields and finding the niche differences between them. Additionally, the paper provides a classification system for human computation using six dimensions:
- Motivation: Speaks about different reward mechanisms for humans in the framework.
- Quality Control: Discusses various measures used to maintain quality of work and control humans that cheat the system’s reward.
- Aggregation: Strategies for combining work done parallely by independent human labour into a block of usable data.
- Human Skill: The extent of human’s ability to facilitate machines. Defines the places where general human computational abilities are better.
- Process Order: Different frameworks of defining workflows with humans (requesters/workers) and computers.
- Task-Request Cardinality: This defines the task assignment combinations such as if one task can be given to multiple humans or multiple tasks to the same human.
Reflection:
The authors define human computation by relying on previous definitions. But, the previous definitions show the dynamic nature of the field and hence, the definition should evolve over time. This, also, affects the derived system classification and its nomenclature. But, the paper is interesting in its effort to provide clear differences between human computation and relevant fields.
I was very interested in learning the different motivations (except monetary benefit) for human workforce. Similar motivations can be seen in early software development, where developers worked on open-source software without a monetary reward but just out of their nature for contributing to society. I believe given any field, monetary reward can never be the only motivation. Human beings are social animals with stronger instinct to contribute to society. Monetary benefit, on the other hand, is just perceptual. The classification nomenclature given by authors is very static to current worker platforms and I believe is subject to change overtime and hence, I believe it has limited advantage.
Questions:
- Can this definition for human computation be static or is it subject to change overtime?
- How can the task-request process, itself, change over-time?
- To what extent should humans support machines before the challenges overcome the rewards?
- What exactly is defined as a growing field? Does it mean the field will grow in research or will it spring out more sub-fields?
I like your opinion about “definition should evolve over time.” However, I don’t think there is no absolute yes or no for this answer. When people try to find the definition of some concept, they always look for the source of the that concept, why this concept has been invented? It was invented for what? After we understand the source of it, we try to understand the development of this concept. After long term development and the frequent use of the concept in a different situation, the definition could be enriched and enlarged. Thus, I would consider a definition will cover a more range over time. Hence, I believe the definition of human computation be will be broader over time.
Hi!
It never occurred to me that the definitions will need to adapt to the timeline before reading your post. Now that I think about it, it makes sense.
I believe in the future, (given my background in VR) I think AR systems will naturally integrate with the real world, allowing a lot more tasks than the modern desktop computers will. Therefore, the tasks may change accordingly by then.
I do not think the challenges will ever overcome the rewards because these systems are ultimately designed by humans and these designers would understand how much reward they should give to meet the bottom line.
I believe there are two steps to a field growing and maturing. At first, the field itself should become deeper, and only after will it allow subfields to spread. I think human computation is still in development (even though the authors mention it started out from 1950), and it needs to be studied further for it to start emerging subfields.
-Jooyoung Whang
I agree with you on the participation on the open source projects, which is a volunteer work. Most people have used Linux either directly or indirectly and it was done by people that we don’t know most of them, but I am sure they are now proud with what they have done.