392 research outputs found
Considering Human Aspects on Strategies for Designing and Managing Distributed Human Computation
A human computation system can be viewed as a distributed system in which the
processors are humans, called workers. Such systems harness the cognitive power
of a group of workers connected to the Internet to execute relatively simple
tasks, whose solutions, once grouped, solve a problem that systems equipped
with only machines could not solve satisfactorily. Examples of such systems are
Amazon Mechanical Turk and the Zooniverse platform. A human computation
application comprises a group of tasks, each of them can be performed by one
worker. Tasks might have dependencies among each other. In this study, we
propose a theoretical framework to analyze such type of application from a
distributed systems point of view. Our framework is established on three
dimensions that represent different perspectives in which human computation
applications can be approached: quality-of-service requirements, design and
management strategies, and human aspects. By using this framework, we review
human computation in the perspective of programmers seeking to improve the
design of human computation applications and managers seeking to increase the
effectiveness of human computation infrastructures in running such
applications. In doing so, besides integrating and organizing what has been
done in this direction, we also put into perspective the fact that the human
aspects of the workers in such systems introduce new challenges in terms of,
for example, task assignment, dependency management, and fault prevention and
tolerance. We discuss how they are related to distributed systems and other
areas of knowledge.Comment: 3 figures, 1 tabl
Crowdsourcing in Computer Vision
Computer vision systems require large amounts of manually annotated data to
properly learn challenging visual concepts. Crowdsourcing platforms offer an
inexpensive method to capture human knowledge and understanding, for a vast
number of visual perception tasks. In this survey, we describe the types of
annotations computer vision researchers have collected using crowdsourcing, and
how they have ensured that this data is of high quality while annotation effort
is minimized. We begin by discussing data collection on both classic (e.g.,
object recognition) and recent (e.g., visual story-telling) vision tasks. We
then summarize key design decisions for creating effective data collection
interfaces and workflows, and present strategies for intelligently selecting
the most important data instances to annotate. Finally, we conclude with some
thoughts on the future of crowdsourcing in computer vision.Comment: A 69-page meta review of the field, Foundations and Trends in
Computer Graphics and Vision, 201
Is Quality Control Pointless?
Intrinsic to the transition towards, and necessary for the success of digital platforms as a service (at scale) is the notion of human computation. Going beyond ‘the wisdom of the crowd’, human computation is the engine that powers platforms and services that are now ubiquitous like Duolingo and Wikipedia. In spite of increasing research and population interest, several issues remain open and in debate on large-scale human computation projects. Quality control is first among these discussions. We conducted an experiment with three different tasks of varying complexity and five different methods to distinguish and protect against constantly under-performing contributors. We illustrate that minimal quality control is enough to repel constantly under-performing contributors and that this effect is constant across tasks of varying complexity
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