Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Talk on crowdsourcing at CSA

Interesting talk today by Sriganesh Madhvanath from HP Labs on the research problems in crowdsourcing. Many aspects were introduced:
  • What should be automated, and what should be crowdsourced?
  • How can we guarantee SLO's (service level objectives) when offering services to customers based on crowdsourcing?
  • The three axes for trade-off: Error (Accuracy) vs. Time vs. Cost (trying to reduce one causes the others to increase).
  • How to reduce the task into small sizes, which can be crowdsourced?
  • How to design the user interface to improve the chances of task completion?
  • How to combine the results of the crowdsourcing (majority vote, etc.)? 
  • How to learn the quality of workers? How to recruit for a given task?
  • etc.