Human Computation and Convergence

Humans are the most effective integrators and producers of information, directly and through the use of information-processing inventions. As these inventions become increasingly sophisticated, the substantive role of humans in processing information will tend toward capabilities that derive from our most complex cognitive processes, e.g., abstraction, creativity, and applied world knowledge. Through the advancement of human computation - methods that leverage the respective strengths of humans and machines in distributed information-processing systems - formerly discrete processes will combine synergistically into increasingly integrated and complex information processing systems. These new, collective systems will exhibit an unprecedented degree of predictive accuracy in modeling physical and techno-social processes, and may ultimately coalesce into a single unified predictive organism, with the capacity to address societies most wicked problems and achieve planetary homeostasis.Comment: Pre-publication draft of chapter. 24 pages, 3 figures; added references to page 1 and 3, and corrected typ

Human Computation and Economics

This article is devoted to economical aspects of Human Computation (HC) and to perspectives of HC in economics. As of economical aspects of HC, it is first observed that much of what makes HC systems effective is economical in nature suggesting that complexity being reconsidered as a “HC complexity” and the conception of efficient HC systems as a “HC economics”. This article also points to the relevance of HC in the development of standard software and to the importance of competition in HC systems. As of HC in economics, it is first argued that markets can be seen as HC systems avant la lettre. Looking more closely at financial markets, the article then points to a speed differential between transactions and credit risk awareness that compromises the efficiency of financial markets. Finally, a HCbased credit risk rating is proposed that, overcoming the afore mentioned speed differential, holds promise for better functioning financial markets

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

Evolutionary Robot Vision for People Tracking Based on Local Clustering

This paper discusses the role of evolutionary computation in visual perception for partner robots. The search of evolutionary computation has many analogies with human visual search. First of all, we discuss the analogies between the evolutionary search and human visual search. Next, we propose the concept of evolutionary robot vision, and a human tracking method based on the evolutionary robot vision. Finally, we show experimental results of the human tracking to discuss the effectiveness of our proposed method

Finish Them!: Pricing Algorithms for Human Computation

Given a batch of human computation tasks, a commonly ignored aspect is how the price (i.e., the reward paid to human workers) of these tasks must be set or varied in order to meet latency or cost constraints. Often, the price is set up-front and not modified, leading to either a much higher monetary cost than needed (if the price is set too high), or to a much larger latency than expected (if the price is set too low). Leveraging a pricing model from prior work, we develop algorithms to optimally set and then vary price over time in order to meet a (a) user-specified deadline while minimizing total monetary cost (b) user-specified monetary budget constraint while minimizing total elapsed time. We leverage techniques from decision theory (specifically, Markov Decision Processes) for both these problems, and demonstrate that our techniques lead to upto 30\% reduction in cost over schemes proposed in prior work. Furthermore, we develop techniques to speed-up the computation, enabling users to leverage the price setting algorithms on-the-fly

Evaluating Singleplayer and Multiplayer in Human Computation Games

Human computation games (HCGs) can provide novel solutions to intractable computational problems, help enable scientific breakthroughs, and provide datasets for artificial intelligence. However, our knowledge about how to design and deploy HCGs that appeal to players and solve problems effectively is incomplete. We present an investigatory HCG based on Super Mario Bros. We used this game in a human subjects study to investigate how different social conditions---singleplayer and multiplayer---and scoring mechanics---collaborative and competitive---affect players' subjective experiences, accuracy at the task, and the completion rate. In doing so, we demonstrate a novel design approach for HCGs, and discuss the benefits and tradeoffs of these mechanics in HCG design.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 2 table