Human Computation

Lecturer: Kenneth Huang

txh710@psu.edu

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Jan 21, 2020

We’re Going to Talk About…

• Human Computation
• Definition of Human Computation
• Comparison

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Many materials are borrowed from Prof. Chris Callison-Burch’s (U Penn) slides:

http://crowdsourcing-class.org/slides/class-intro.pdf

Wikipedia @2020/01/20

Human Computation

• What constitutes “human computation”:
1. The problems fit the general paradigm of computation, and as such might someday be solvable by computers.
2. The human participation is directed by the computational system or process.

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Human Computation: A Survey and Taxonomy of a Growing Field. Quinn et al. CHI'11.

Human Computation

• What constitutes “human computation”:
• The problems fit the general paradigm of computation, and as such might someday be solvable by computers.
• The human participation is directed by the computational system or process.

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Crowdsourcing:

Whereas human computation replaces computers with humans, crowdsourcing replaces traditional human workers with members of the public.

Human Computation

• What constitutes “human computation”:
• The problems fit the general paradigm of computation, and as such might someday be solvable by computers.
• The human participation is directed by the computational system or process.

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Social Computing:

Humans in a social role where communication is mediated by technology. The purpose is not usually to perform a computation.

Human Computation

• What constitutes “human computation”:
• The problems fit the general paradigm of computation, and as such might someday be solvable by computers.
• The human participation is directed by the computational system or process.

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Collective Intelligence:

Large groups of loosely organized people can accomplish great things working together.

Human Computation or Crowdsourcing?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kempelen_chess1.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tuerkischer_schachspieler_racknitz3.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tuerkischer_schachspieler_windisch4.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Turk.jpg

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Why?

• “Human Computation” Mindset
• Easier to model (at scale)
• Useful in specific scenarios
• …?

What are the concerns?

• What if people cheat?
• Do people like to do this?
• How to make boring jobs fun? (Is it even possible?)�
• Alienation of labor

Dark Side of

Crowdsourcing

Surveillance

Alienation and Deskilling

Race to the Bottom

Moral Valence

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Jonathan Zittrain, “Minds for Sale”

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How to put�crowdsourcing�towards good uses

NASA Clickworkers (2000)

“Public volunteers … can do some routine science analysis that would normally be done by a scientist or graduate student working for months on end.”

“From November 17, 2000 to January 3, 2002, we had as many as 101,000 clickworkers volunteering 14,000 work hours, 612,832 sessions, and 2,378,820 entries!”

NASA Clickworkers (2000)

Text + Img: http://www.nasaclickworkers.com/classic.php

Mars age map produced directly from clickworker inputs.

Mars age map produced from scientist's catalog.

Color guide: red=heavily cratered (old), green=medium, violet=lightly cratered (young).

NASA Clickworkers (2000)

Kanefsky, B., Barlow, N. G., & Gulick, V. C. (2001). Can distributed volunteers accomplish massive data analysis tasks. Lunar and Planetary Science, 1.

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Clicks from 220 individuals.

Consensus obtained by a

weighted clustering of inputs.

Office Hours

• Prof. Kenneth Huang
• Tuesday 4pm - 5pm
• Westgate E357�
• Chieh-Yang Huang (TA)
• Monday & Friday 3pm - 4pm
• Westgate 2F Seating Area (IST side, next to Cafe)

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Assignment 1

• Go to Canvas!
• Demo: https://worker.mturk.com/

Human Computation

Lecturer: Kenneth Huang

txh710@psu.edu

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Jan 21, 2020