01/29/20 – Yuhang Liu – Human computation: a survey and taxonomy of a growing field

In this article, Alexander J. Quinn, Benjamin B. Bederson. First introduced the background, then discussed the definition of human computer, distinguished and compared with related technologies, and then put forward the classification system for human computer system, and explained how to find new research points based on the proposed classification system. The article first proposed the definition of human computation. The author believes that human computation should meet:

1. The problems fit the general paradigm of computation, and as such might someday be solvable by computers.
2. The human participation is directed by the computational system or process. Then the author compares human computation with other concepts, which mainly include: crowd sourcing, social computing, data mining, and collective intelligence.

The main differences from these concepts are the presence of computers and the application direction. Then the author proposed a new classification dimension. According to the proposed dimension, problems can be considered the following aspects:

1. Combining different dimensions to discover new applications.
2. Create new values for a given dimension.
3. When encountering a new human computer system, classify it according to the current dimensions to discover new things

I think this article is similar to another article “An Affordance-Based Framework for Human Computation and Human-Computer Collaboration”. This article is all about the new direction of human computation. To help people find new methods through new classification systems, and find new applications based on the combination of different dimensions. The other article is about a new research method “Affordance”, which achieves better research results based on the relationship between humans and machines. And I think the arguments of the two articles coincide: The classification system mentioned in this article has six dimensions, motivation, quality control, aggregation, human skill, process order, task request cardinality. Among them, human skills can correspond to human advantages, that is the part of “affordance” that humans can take part in human computation. And motivation, quality control, aggregation as the description in another article, humans cannot be like computers, People cannot completely give up subjective thinking and realize unbiased analysis. The process order reflects different interaction methods and different interaction orders in human computation. Task request cardinality can correspond to other “affordance” methods. When the number of participants is large, there will be different methods. So I think in some ways the two articles are complementary. At the same time, in this article, the author also mentioned the difference between human computation and other concepts. I think this is very important in future research. In future research, there will be more and more interdisciplinary crossings, so it is important to distinguish these disciplines, determine the boundaries of the disciplines, and lay a solid foundation for different disciplines. The foundation, universal methods, and efficient solutions are not only good for the development of each discipline, but also have a very important impact in the interdisciplinary process.

What is the significance of distinguishing human computation from other definitions?

What are the characteristic of human computation corresponding with the six dimensions mentioned in article?

Is there a new dimension, and if it is combined with the dimensions mentioned in the article, what new applications will it have?