What is human computation?
Human computation is a process that makes use of human’s power to solve the problem that could not currently be solved (well) by computers. As several related field emerging in recent years, understanding similarities and difference between them and human computation will contribute in the research and applications.
Collective intelligence consists of crowdsourcing, social computing, a large portion of human computation and a small portion of data mining. Crowdsourcing comes in when a designated job is outsourced to a (large) group of people; social computing refers to when communication in online communities is mediated by technology; data mining is the process of finding patterns among huge amount of data; collective intelligence is a broad field where products of many people’s action are proved to be wiser.
Human computation can be classified according to 6 dimensions: motivation, quality control, aggregation, human skill, process order and task-request cardinality. Current research and projects on human computation share a combination of different values.
Reflection
This is a comprehensive paper and it covers a lot of dimension in human computation. I found myself stuck for a long time and then came up with many tiny passing thoughts. It’s hard to tell something about the whole similarities/difference or analyze if the number of dimensions should be six…
I believe a human computation system requires a lot of effort, just like the making progress on machine intelligence. Design, implementation, improvement, extra budget, etc. How do people determine the trade-off between the choice of the research towards a better model and the choice of a human computation assistance? I think for now the preference is to find help from human computation, but it’s changing gradually. As the paradox of automation evolves into a higher level, the tasks are also going through an improvement – they require higher-level human skills. While the smartness of machine approach 100% authentic, the role of human in human computation will approach “verifying the decision” rather than “filling the gap”.
If a guy gets all his paycheck from different tasks in human computation, his career will be totally different from someone sitting in the room focusing on certain responsibilities for a long time. The goals of the tasks vary so he/she has to switch really quickly between fields, actions and routines. Precision on first few objects would be lower and goes up gradually. All these require careful observation and adjustment compared to collecting the results from traditional employees.
All the implicit work is probably written in user privacies, but I don’t’ read them:P For example, situations where identity confirmation is needed always annoy me. As a CS student I should understand how important it is to secure my important information, however, “Select all squares with traffic lights” really bothers me. As I know more about machine learning and I realized that I’m helping to train Google’s AI, I became even more angry (I shouldn’t, I actually participated in several human computation with a motivation of altruism). I don’t know if it’s just me or it bothers other people, too.
Questions
How to find a good combination in human computation? An urgent task may pay (higher) to collect the results in need. How to prevent contributors from rushing for money? How to make sure different motivation reflect less on the outcome of the tasks? Will a paycheck have absolutely no influence on contributors? If not, how do we create a balanced inspiration to avoid the bias/influence?
What is the best practice to reveal what’s behind smart machine-move step by step? Contributors have been around for more than 10 years. If it’s not this course asking me to understand and utilize the tool of crowdsourcing, I may not realize that the underlying non-macine intelligence is all around. Why I haven’t heard much about this group of people and their job? Does it come naturally with the feature of their job or is there anything holding their opinion back from public?
