Abstract
Crowd-powered systems combine computation with human intelligence, drawn from large groups of people connecting and coordinating online. These hybrid systems enable applications and experiences that neither crowds nor computation could support alone.
Unfortunately, crowd work is error-prone and slow, making it difficult to incorporate crowds as first-order building blocks in software. We introduce computational techniques that decompose complex tasks into simpler, verifiable steps to improve quality, and optimize work to return results in seconds. Using these techniques, we prototype a set of interactive crowd-powered systems. The first, Soylent, is a word processor that uses paid micro-contributions to aid writing tasks such as text shortening and proofreading. Using Soylent is like having access to an entire editorial staff as you write. The second system, Adrenaline, is a camera that uses crowds to help amateur photographers capture the exact right moment for a photo. It finds the best smile and catches subjects in mid-air jumps, all in realtime. These systems point to a future where social and crowd intelligence are central elements of interaction, software, and computation.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bernstein MS (2012) Crowd-powered systems. PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Bernstein MS, Brandt J, Miller RC, Karger DR (2011) Crowds in two seconds: enabling realtime crowd-powered interfaces. In: Proc of UIST ’11. doi:10.1145/2047196.2047201
Bernstein MS, Karger DR, Miller RC, Brandt J (2012) Analytic methods for optimizing realtime crowdsourcing. In: Proc collective intelligence
Bernstein MS, Little G, Miller RC, Hartmann B, Ackerman MS, Crowell D, Panovich K (2010) Soylent: a word processor with a crowd inside. In: Proc of UIST ’10
Branson S, Wah C, Schroff F, Babenko B, Welinder P, Perona P, Belongie S (2010) Visual recognition with humans in the loop. In: Proc of ECCV 2010
Card SK, Moran TP, Newell A (1983) The psychology of human-computer interaction. Erlbaum, Hillsdale
Dai P, Mausam, Weld D (2010) Decision-theoretic control of crowd-sourced workflows. In: Proc of AAAI’10. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=dai+weld&btnG=&as_sdt=1,22&as_sdtp=#1
Engelbart DC, English WK (1968) A research center for augmenting human intellect. In: Proc of fall joint computer conference, Part I. ACM, New York
Franklin M, Kossmann D, Kraska T, Ramesh S, Xin R (2011) CrowdDB: answering queries with crowdsourcing. In: Proc, SIGMOD’11
Gingold Y, Shamir A, Cohen-Or D (2012) Micro perceptual human computation. ACM Trans Graph 31(5):119. doi:10.1145/2231816.2231817
Grier DA (2005) When computers were human. Princeton University Press, Princeton. http://www.amazon.com/When-Computers-Human-David-Grier/dp/0691091579
Gross D, Harris C (1998) Fundamentals of queueing theory
Kamar E, Hacker S, Horvitz E (2012) Combining human and machine intelligence in large-scale crowdsourcing. In: Proc of AAMAS’12. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/horvitz/crowdsynth.pdf
Kanefsky B, Barlow N, Gulick V (2001) Can distributed volunteers accomplish massive data analysis tasks? In: Lunar and planetary institute science conference abstracts, lunar and planetary inst. Technical report, vol 32
Marcus A, Wu E, Karger DR, Madden S, Miller RC (2011) Human-powered sorts and joins. Proc VLDB Endow 5(1):13–24
Mason W, Suri S (2010) A guide to conducting behavioral research on Amazon’s mechanical turk. Social science research network 1691163. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1691163_code1554670.pdf?abstractid=1691163&mirid=1
Minder P, Bernstein A (2011) CrowdLang—first steps towards programmable human computers for general computation. In: Proc of HCOMP ’11
Noronha J, Hysen E, Zhang H, Gajos KZ (2011) Platemate: crowdsourcing nutritional analysis from food photographs. In: Proc of UIST ’11. ACM, New York
Parameswaran A, Park H, Garcia-Molina H, Polyzotis N, Widom, J (2011) Deco: declarative crowdsourcing
Stranders R, Ramchurn SD, Shi B, Jennings NR (2011) CollabMap: augmenting maps using the wisdom of crowds. In: Proc of HCOMP ’11
Surowiecki J (2005) The wisdom of crowds. Random House, New York. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1095645
Sutherland IE (1964) Sketch pad a man-machine graphical communication system. In: Proceedings of the SHARE design automation workshop. ACM, New York, pp 6–329
Acknowledgements
This work was completed in close collaboration with Robert C. Miller (MIT), David R. Karger (MIT), Mark S. Ackerman (U. Michigan) and Bjoern Hartmann (UC Berkeley).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bernstein, M.S. Crowd-Powered Systems. Künstl Intell 27, 69–73 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-012-0233-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-012-0233-0