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Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining pp 499–510Cite as

Crowdsourcing and Human Computation: Introduction

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Synonyms

Crowdsourcing; Human computation

Glossary

AC:

Automatic computers

AI:

Artificial intelligence

AMT:

Amazon Mechanical Turk

GWAP:

Games with a purpose

HIT:

Human intelligence task

IR:

Information retrieval

MT:

Machine translation

NLP:

Natural language processing

Introduction

The first computers were actually people (Grier 2005). Later, machines were built, known at the time as Automatic computers (ACs), to perform many routine computations. While such machines have continued to advance and now perform many of the routine processing tasks once delegated to people, human capabilities still continue to exceed state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) on a variety of important data analysis tasks, such as those involving image (Sorokin and Forsyth 2008) and language understanding (Snow et al. 2008). Consequently, today’s Internet-based access to 24/7 online human crowds has sparked the advent of crowdsourcing (Howe 2006) and a renaissance of human computation (Quinn and...

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Acknowledgments

We thank Jessica Hullman for her thoughtful comments and editing regarding broader impacts of crowdsourcing (Lease et al. 2013). We also thank AMT personnel for the very useful platform they have built and their clear interest in supporting academic researchers using AMT. Last but not least, we thank the global crowd of individuals who have contributed and continue to contribute to crowdsourcing projects worldwide. Thank you for making crowdsourcing possible.

Matthew Lease was supported in part by an NSF CAREER award, a DARPA Young Faculty Award N66001-12-1-4256, and a Temple Fellowship. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this entry are those of the authors alone and do not express the views of any of the funding agencies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Matthew Lease

  2. Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Corp, Mountain View, CA, USA

    Omar Alonso

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  1. Matthew Lease
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Correspondence to Matthew Lease .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada

    Reda Alhajj

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada

    Jon Rokne

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Lease, M., Alonso, O. (2018). Crowdsourcing and Human Computation: Introduction. In: Alhajj, R., Rokne, J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7131-2_107

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