Human computation is a new and evolving research area that centers around harnessing human intelligence to solve computational problems that are beyond the scope of existing Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. With the growth of the Web, human computation systems can now leverage the abilities of an unprecedented number of people via the Web to perform complex computation. There are various genres of human computation applications that exist today. Games with a purpose (e.g., the ESP Game) specifically target online gamers who generate useful data (e.g., image tags) while playing an enjoyable game. Crowdsourcing marketplaces (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk) are human computation systems that coordinate workers to perform tasks in exchange for monetary rewards. In identity verification tasks, users perform computation in order to gain access to some online content; an example is reCAPTCHA, which leverages millions of users who solve CAPTCHAs every day to correct words in books that optical character recognition (OCR) programs fail to recognize with certainty. This book is aimed at achieving four goals: (1) defining human computation as a research area; (2) providing a comprehensive review of existing work; (3) drawing connections to a wide variety of disciplines, including AI, Machine Learning, HCI, Mechanism/Market Design and Psychology, and capturing their unique perspectives on the core research questions in human computation; and (4) suggesting promising research directions for the future. Table of Contents: Introduction / Human Computation Algorithms / Aggregating Outputs / Task Routing / Understanding Workers and Requesters / The Art of Asking Questions / The Future of Human Computation
Edith Law is a Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, who is doing research on human computation systems that harness the joint efforts of machines and humans, with a focus on games with a purpose and citizen science. She is the co-organizers of the 1st and 3rd human computation workshops (HCOMP2009 andHCOMP2011), and the recipient of Microsoft Graduate Research Fellowship 2009-2011. Her work on TagATune has received a best paper nomination at CHI 2009.
Luis von Ahn is the A. Nico Habermann Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His current research interests include building systems that combine the intelligence of humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone. An example of his work is reCAPTCHA, in which over 750 million people―more than 10% of humanity―have helped digitize books and newspapers. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Packard Fellowship, a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship, and a Sloan Research Fellowship. He has been named one of the 50 Best Minds in Science by Discover Magazine, one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business of 2010 by Fast Company Magazine, and one of the “Brilliant 10" scientists of 2006 by Popular Science Magazine.
