Crowdsourcing and Project Examples

Wuzhou Zhang Feb 8, 2012 Overview amateurs

volunteers experts z a distributed problem-solving and production model

Money Problems Prize/ experts volunteers recognition

Rewards intellectual small amateurs satisfaction businesses Project Example 1: Amazon Mechanical Turk

z Launched by Amazon.com in 2005 z A platform on which crowdsourcing tasks are called "HITs" (Human Intelligence Tasks”) z https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome Project Example 2: Tribevine z Tribevine is a project that collects sports and outdoor gear information into a user edited semi structured product information database. z http://www.tribevine.com/home Project Example 3: reCAPTCHA z Started by Luis von Ahn at CMU z reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows z http://www.google.com/recaptcha z Create a account Project Example 4: ESP Game z Started in 2003 by Luis von Ahn z Later acquired by and renamed Google Image Labeler z Gets people to label images as a side-effect of playing a game. The image labels can be used to improve image search on the Web. z This game led to the concept of Games with a purpose. z Ended on September 16, 2011 Project Example 5: Duolingo z Started by Luis von Ahn z Launched in private beta on November 30, 2011 ( Two months ago! ) z http://duolingo.com/ Luis von Ahn z B.S. in mathematics from Duke University in 2000. z Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005. z One of the pioneers of crowdsourcing. z Founded the company reCAPTCHA, which was acquired by Google in 2009. Discussion z From Jun Yang’s afterthoughts on Sarah Cohen's guest lecture: z “It seems that the task of identifying "breaks" in a large PDF obtained by concatenating many documents would be very amenable to crowdsourcing. If any of us want to try set up an Amazon Turk job or create a CAPTCHA-like service, Sarah may be interested in collaborating.” Main references: z http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crowdsourcing_projects z http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing z http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP_game z http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA z http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_von_Ahn z http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboratio n.html