Do you have any more examples of problems that have been solved or are trying to be solved using this approach?
This idea sounds very interesting and potentially a good business, but that rests completely on there being a large set of problems that would be cheaper to solve this way than by another method.
Yes, the business case rests strongly on having a big enough market. We think (strong gut feel, but without much data to back it up yet) that there is a very large potential market. It’s kind of a “latent” market—it’s a way to solve problems that people are not thinking about yet. I think of it like this: before computers became widespread, did people think about using computational tools to solve problems? No, not really. Likewise, I think, for “human computation”. The capacity of the human perceptual systems to process input, and to make subtle judgments, is really tremendous, but that has not been harnessed as a resource for problem solving until recently.
There’s definitely a market for what I would call “plain vanilla” human computation tasks: text and audio transcription, business listing verification, etc (high volume but cognitively boring stuff). The existence and revenue-generation by MTurk and Crowd Flower, for example, is strong evidence of this. We also think there will be a market for more interesting problem-solving applications in science and engineering research.
Another example: Air Quality Researcher Guy wants to model exposure to indoor and outdoor air pollution across regions in the country; people spend lots of time in their houses, so that constitutes a lot of their exposure (integrating over time); open windows dramatically change the indoor/outdoor air mix. Therefore if we know something about window-opening frequency (and regional demographics, weather, etc) we can correlate that to incidence of respiratory illnesses, for example. Soooo...we sample images from Google Streetview and have people tell us if windows are open! (simplified, ongoing project).
We also think that the field of metagenomics, and the other new “-omics” fields in biology may have some interesting applications. They generate data much faster than they can analyze it, and the tools for making comparisons between this-thing-that-we-don’t-know-what-it-is and that-other-new-thing-that-looks-kinda-like-the-old-thing-sorta-maybe are incomplete and don’t do a great job (plus the inherent inexact comparative nature of biology) makes us think human computation could contribute to solutions.
Another possible application: a single-stream recycling sorting center using real-time (or near enough to real-time) human computation for sorting objects according to a binary tree corresponding to a binary conveyor system.
So there’s reason to think there are lots of interesting, as-yet-undiscovered applications for this! So again...if this lights any lightbulbs, or you have suggestions for applications, please let me know!
Do you have any more examples of problems that have been solved or are trying to be solved using this approach?
This idea sounds very interesting and potentially a good business, but that rests completely on there being a large set of problems that would be cheaper to solve this way than by another method.
Yes, the business case rests strongly on having a big enough market. We think (strong gut feel, but without much data to back it up yet) that there is a very large potential market. It’s kind of a “latent” market—it’s a way to solve problems that people are not thinking about yet. I think of it like this: before computers became widespread, did people think about using computational tools to solve problems? No, not really. Likewise, I think, for “human computation”. The capacity of the human perceptual systems to process input, and to make subtle judgments, is really tremendous, but that has not been harnessed as a resource for problem solving until recently.
There’s definitely a market for what I would call “plain vanilla” human computation tasks: text and audio transcription, business listing verification, etc (high volume but cognitively boring stuff). The existence and revenue-generation by MTurk and Crowd Flower, for example, is strong evidence of this. We also think there will be a market for more interesting problem-solving applications in science and engineering research.
Another example: Air Quality Researcher Guy wants to model exposure to indoor and outdoor air pollution across regions in the country; people spend lots of time in their houses, so that constitutes a lot of their exposure (integrating over time); open windows dramatically change the indoor/outdoor air mix. Therefore if we know something about window-opening frequency (and regional demographics, weather, etc) we can correlate that to incidence of respiratory illnesses, for example. Soooo...we sample images from Google Streetview and have people tell us if windows are open! (simplified, ongoing project).
We also think that the field of metagenomics, and the other new “-omics” fields in biology may have some interesting applications. They generate data much faster than they can analyze it, and the tools for making comparisons between this-thing-that-we-don’t-know-what-it-is and that-other-new-thing-that-looks-kinda-like-the-old-thing-sorta-maybe are incomplete and don’t do a great job (plus the inherent inexact comparative nature of biology) makes us think human computation could contribute to solutions.
Another possible application: a single-stream recycling sorting center using real-time (or near enough to real-time) human computation for sorting objects according to a binary tree corresponding to a binary conveyor system.
Some other things people have already done using human computation: ask humans to generate social scripts to help “train” people with autism for various social interactions; have people answer questions about pictures taken with a smartphone app for blind people (“Is this beverage can a Coke or a beer?”); tag photos from a film company’s archive and use an algorithm to link entities and “connect the dots” to realize that the photos are the lost rolls of film from the set of “American Graffiti”
So there’s reason to think there are lots of interesting, as-yet-undiscovered applications for this! So again...if this lights any lightbulbs, or you have suggestions for applications, please let me know!