Skip to main content

Human Computation and Crowdsearching

  • Chapter
Web Information Retrieval

Abstract

Human computation (HC) is the discipline that aims at harmonizing the contribution of humans and computers in the resolution of complex tasks. The general principle of HC is to use computer and network architectures to organize the distributed allocation of work to a crowd of human performers, who contribute their skill in solving problems where algorithms fail or produce uncertain output, like object recognition in images or text translation. HC solutions assume a variety of forms, from crowdsourcing labor markets, to data collection or early alerting mobile applications, to games with a purpose and crowdsearching. This chapter overviews a few exemplary applications, discusses a conceptual framework that abstracts the common aspects of the existing approaches, classifies the dimensions that characterize an HC solution, and highlights some open research questions and projects addressing them.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 69.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    www.creekwatch.org.

  2. 2.

    http://de21.digitalasia.chubu.ac.jp/floodmap.

  3. 3.

    http://twitcident.com/.

  4. 4.

    http://images.google.com/.

References

  1. T. Abdelzaher, Y. Anokwa, P. Boda, J. Burke, D. Estrin, L. Guibas, A. Kansal, S. Madden, J. Reich, Mobiscopes for human spaces. IEEE Pervasive Comput. 6, 20–29 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. O. Aulov, M. Halem, Assimilation of real-time satellite and human sensor networks for modeling natural disasters, in AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  3. N. Bansal, B. Srivastava, On using crowd for measuring traffic at aggregate level for emerging countries, in Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Information Integration on the Web: in Conjunction with WWW 2011 (2011), pp. 5:1–5:6

    Google Scholar 

  4. A. Bozzon, M. Brambilla, S. Ceri, Answering search queries with CrowdSearcher, in WWW, ed. by A. Mille, F.L. Gandon, J. Misselis, M. Rabinovich, S. Staab (ACM, New York, 2012), pp. 1009–1018

    Google Scholar 

  5. A. Bozzon, M. Brambilla, S. Ceri, A. Mauri, Reactive crowdsourcing, in WWW (2013), pp. 153–164

    Google Scholar 

  6. M. Brambilla, P. Fraternali, C. Vaca, BPMN and design patterns for engineering social BPM solutions, in Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on BPM and Social Software (BPMS 2011) (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  7. O.J. Cacho, D. Spring, S. Hester, R.M. Nally, Allocating surveillance effort in the management of invasive species: a spatially-explicit model. Environ. Model. Softw. 25(4), 444–454 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. A.T. Campbell, S.B. Eisenman, N.D. Lane, E. Miluzzo, R.A. Peterson, H. Lu, X. Zheng, M. Musolesi, K. Fodor, G.-S. Ahn, The rise of people-centric sensing. IEEE Internet Comput. 12(4), 12–21 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. K.T. Chan, I. King, M.-C. Yuen, Mathematical modeling of social games, in International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, CSE’09, vol. 4 (2009), pp. 1205–1210

    Google Scholar 

  10. S. Cooper, F. Khatib, A. Treuille, J. Barbero, J. Lee, M. Beenen, A. Leaver-Fay, D. Baker, Z. Popovic, Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game. Nature 466(7307), 756–760 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. J.S. Downs, M.B. Holbrook, S. Sheng, L.F. Cranor, Are your participants gaming the system? Screening mechanical turk workers, in Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2010), pp. 2399–2402

    Google Scholar 

  12. P. Dutta, P.M. Aoki, N. Kumar, A. Mainwaring, C. Myers, W. Willett, A. Woodruff, Common Sense: Participatory urban sensing using a network of handheld air quality monitors, in Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (2009), pp. 349–350

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  13. Eclipse Foundation, SMILA—SeMantic Information Logistics Architecture, http://www.eclipse.org/smila. Accessed Sept 2012

  14. P. Fraternali, M. Tagliasacchi, D. Martinenghi, A. Bozzon, I. Catallo, E. Ciceri, F.S. Nucci, V. Croce, I.S. Altingövde, W. Siberski, F. Giunchiglia, W. Nejdl, M. Larson, E. Izquierdo, P. Daras, O. Chrons, R. Traphöner, B. Decker, J. Lomas, P. Aichroth, J. Novak, G. Sillaume, F. Sánchez-Figueroa, C. Salas-Parra, The CUBRIK project: human-enhanced time-aware multimedia search, in WWW (Companion Volume), ed. by A. Mille, F.L. Gandon, J. Misselis, M. Rabinovich, S. Staab (ACM, New York, 2012), pp. 259–262

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  15. M. Hamilton, F. Salim, E. Cheng, S. Choy, Transafe: a crowdsourced mobile platform for crime and safety perception management. Comput. Soc. 41(2), 32–37 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. J. Heer, M. Bostock, Crowdsourcing graphical perception: using mechanical turk to assess visualization design, in Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, NY (2010), pp. 203–212

    Google Scholar 

  17. J. Howe, The rise of crowdsourcing. Wired 14(6) (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  18. X. Hu, M. Stalnacke, T.B. Minde, R. Carlsson, S. Larsson, A mobile game to collect and improve position of images, in Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Next Generation Mobile Applications, Services and Technologies (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  19. E. Huang, H. Zhang, D.C. Parkes, K.Z. Gajos, Y. Chen, Toward automatic task design: a progress report, in Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Human Computation (2010), pp. 77–85

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  20. P. Ipeirotis, The new demographics of Mechanical Turk (2010), http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2010/03/new-demographics-of-mechanical-turk.html

  21. P.G. Ipeirotis, P.K. Paritosh, Managing crowdsourced human computation: a tutorial, in Proceedings of the 20th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web (2011), pp. 287–288

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  22. P.G. Ipeirotis, F. Provost, J. Wang, Quality management on Amazon Mechanical Turk, in Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Human Computation (KDD-HCOMP 2010) (2010), pp. 64–67

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  23. A. Jøsang, R. Ismail, C. Boyd, A survey of trust and reputation systems for online service provision. Decis. Support Syst. 43(2), 618–644 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. F. Khatib, F. DiMaio, F.C. Group, F.V.C. Group, S. Cooper, M. Kazmierczyk, M. Gilski, S. Krzywda, H. Zabranska, I. Pichova, J. Thompson, Z. Popovic’, M. Jaskolski, D. Baker, Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players. Nat. Struct. Mol. Biol. 18(10), 1175–1177 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. S. Kim, C. Robson, T. Zimmerman, J. Pierce, E.M. Haber, Creek watch: pairing usefulness and usability for successful citizen science, in Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, NY (2011), pp. 2125–2134

    Google Scholar 

  26. S. Koelstra, A. Yazdani, M. Soleymani, C. Mühl, J.-S. Lee, A. Nijholt, T. Pun, T. Ebrahimi, I. Patras, Single trial classification of EEG and peripheral physiological signals for recognition of emotions induced by music videos, in Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Brain Informatics (2010), pp. 89–100

    Google Scholar 

  27. L.I. Kuncheva, C.J. Whitaker, C.A. Shipp, Limits on the majority vote accuracy in classifier fusion. Pattern Anal. Appl. 6(1), 22–31 (2003)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  28. Y. Liu, P. Piyawongwisal, S. Handa, L. Yu, Y. Xu, A. Samuel, Going beyond citizen data collection with Mapster: a Mobile+Cloud citizen science experiment, in Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Computing for Citizen Science (eScience 2001) (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  29. D.G. Lowe, Distinctive image features from scale-invariant keypoints. Int. J. Comput. Vis. 60(2), 91–110 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. N. Maisonneuve, M. Stevens, M.E. Niessen, P. Hanappe, L. Steels, Citizen noise pollution monitoring, in Proceedings of the 10th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Social Networks: Making Connections Between Citizens, Data and Government (2009), pp. 96–103

    Google Scholar 

  31. C. Manasseh, K. Ahern, R. Sengupta, The connected traveler: using location and personalization on mobile devices to improve transportation, in Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Location and the Web (LOCWEB09) (2009), pp. 1–4

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  32. M. Mozer, H. Pashler, M.H. Wilder, R.A. Lindsey, M. Jones, M. Jones, Improving human judgments by decontaminating sequential dependencies, in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (2010), pp. 1705–1713

    Google Scholar 

  33. Nielsen, What Americans do online: social media and games dominate activity, Technical report, Nielsen, Aug 2011

    Google Scholar 

  34. A. Parameswaran, A.D. Sarma, H. Garcia-Molina, N. Polyzotis, J. Widom, Human-assisted graph search: it’s okay to ask questions, Technical report, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, 2010

    Google Scholar 

  35. G. Pickard, I. Rahwan, W. Pan, M. Cebrián, R. Crane, A. Madan, A. Pentland, Time critical social mobilization: the DARPA network challenge winning strategy, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6055/509 (2010)

  36. A.J. Quinn, B.B. Bederson, Human computation: a survey and taxonomy of a growing field, in Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2011), pp. 1403–1412

    Google Scholar 

  37. T. Sakaki, M. Okazaki, Y. Matsuo, Earthquake shakes Twitter users: real-time event detection by social sensors, in Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW10) (2010), pp. 851–860

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  38. A.G. Sanfey, Social decision-making: insights from game theory and neuroscience. Science 318(5850), 598–602 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. S. Shah, F. Bao, C.T. Lu, I.R. Chen, CROWDSAFE: crowd sourcing of crime incidents and safe routing on mobile devices, in Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM, New York, 2011), pp. 521–524

    Google Scholar 

  40. J.R. Stothard, J.C. Sousa-Figueiredo, M. Betson, E.Y.W. Seto, N.B. Kabatereine, Investigating the spatial micro-epidemiology of diseases within a point-prevalence sample: a field applicable method for rapid mapping of households using low-cost gps-dataloggers. Trans. R. Soc. Trop. Med. Hyg. (2011), http://trstmh.oxfordjournals.org/content/105/9/500.short

  41. A. Tversky, D. Kahneman, Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases. Science 185, 1124–1131 (1974)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  42. L. von Ahn, Human computation, in CIVR (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  43. L. von Ahn, Human computation, Ph.D. thesis, CMU, CMU-CS-05-193, Dec 2005

    Google Scholar 

  44. L. von Ahn, L. Dabbish, Labeling images with a computer game, in CHI, ed. by E. Dykstra-Erickson, M. Tscheligi (ACM, New York, 2004), pp. 319–326

    Google Scholar 

  45. L. von Ahn, L. Dabbish, Designing games with a purpose. Commun. ACM 51(8), 58–67 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  46. L. von Ahn, R. Liu, M. Blum, Peekaboom: a game for locating objects in images, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI’06 (ACM, New York, 2006), pp. 55–64

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  47. L. von Ahn, B. Maurer, C. McMillen, D. Abraham, M. Blum, reCAPTCHA: human-based character recognition via web security measures. Science 321(5895), 1465–1468 (2008)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  48. J. Zittrain, Ubiquitous human computing. Philos. Trans. R. Soc., Math. Phys. Eng. Sci. 366(1881), 3813–3821 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Ceri, S., Bozzon, A., Brambilla, M., Della Valle, E., Fraternali, P., Quarteroni, S. (2013). Human Computation and Crowdsearching. In: Web Information Retrieval. Data-Centric Systems and Applications. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39314-3_15

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39314-3_15

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-39313-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39314-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics