InterPoll: Crowd-Sourced Internet Polls

Crowd-sourcing is increasingly being used to provide answers to online polls and surveys. However, existing systems, while taking care of the mechanics of attracting crowd workers, poll building, and payment, provide little to help the survey-maker or pollster in obtaining statistically significant results devoid of even the obvious selection biases. This paper proposes InterPoll, a platform for programming of crowd-sourced polls. Pollsters express polls as embedded LINQ queries and the runtime correctly reasons about uncertainty in those polls, only polling as many people as required to meet statistical guarantees. To optimize the cost of polls, InterPoll performs query optimization, as well as bias correction and power analysis. The goal of InterPoll is to provide a system that can be reliably used for research into marketing, social and political science questions. This paper highlights some of the existing challenges and how InterPoll is designed to address most of them. In this paper we summarize some of the work we have already done and give an outline for future work

Quality Control in Crowdsourcing: A Survey of Quality Attributes, Assessment Techniques and Assurance Actions

Crowdsourcing enables one to leverage on the intelligence and wisdom of potentially large groups of individuals toward solving problems. Common problems approached with crowdsourcing are labeling images, translating or transcribing text, providing opinions or ideas, and similar - all tasks that computers are not good at or where they may even fail altogether. The introduction of humans into computations and/or everyday work, however, also poses critical, novel challenges in terms of quality control, as the crowd is typically composed of people with unknown and very diverse abilities, skills, interests, personal objectives and technological resources. This survey studies quality in the context of crowdsourcing along several dimensions, so as to define and characterize it and to understand the current state of the art. Specifically, this survey derives a quality model for crowdsourcing tasks, identifies the methods and techniques that can be used to assess the attributes of the model, and the actions and strategies that help prevent and mitigate quality problems. An analysis of how these features are supported by the state of the art further identifies open issues and informs an outlook on hot future research directions.Comment: 40 pages main paper, 5 pages appendi

Remote synchronous crowd support in challenging sports events

Social support is a most powerful expression of human beings. It can make humans overcome barriers that seem impossible. Research shows that athletes, who are supported through being cheered on during events, perform better. However, up until recently, little could be done to cheer athletes during races unless supporters were physically present at the event. We investigate ways in which remote online spectators can support athletes in real-time. Is the support from remote spectators effective? How can we design systems for real-time support and what factors influence their effectiveness? To research this, we iteratively design online crowd interfaces, mobile applications, and devices that allow athletes to communicate with distributed spectators during sport activities. Athletes are able to broadcast their live performance to spectators through locative and biometric data sharing. Concurrently, remote spectators support the athletes by clicking a cheer button that instantly makes the athletes aware that a crowd is following their performance. We then conduct a series of investigations during multiple sport events, using different support modalities and diverse crowds. Results indicate that remote crowd support does motivate the athletes by making the athletes aware that they are being supported. More interestingly, if we categorise supporters into close relatives, acquaintances and unknown spectators, the most effective support seems to be that of acquaintances. This work also provides design guidelines for researchers and designers of remote crowd support systems

State and spaces of official labour statistics in the Federal Republic of Germany, c.1950-1973

This PhD examines the historical making and interpretation of West-German official labour statistics in the period 1950-1973: how did official statistics come to be inscribed in state and administrative attempts to intervene into the labour market with respect to (un-)employment? Rather than considering statistics as a resource for state action and scientific investigation, this thesis is concerned with statistics as a contested topic comprising different techniques and ideas, styles of reasoning, practices, technologies and institutional contexts. Drawing on archival material from the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, the Federal Labour Office, the Federal Statistical Office, the Organisation for Economic Corporation and Development (OECD), and other sources, the thesis examines debates over the abolition of the federal labour office’s labour statistics 1950–1963, and the establishment of a new statistical infrastructure in the following decade. In bridging work in economic and social history, and the history and geography of official statistics and technology, this thesis shows how debate on the employment files – generated in 1935 and reestablished in 1950 – as the basis of quarterly official statistics was centred on the question of which statistics for which polity. This involved different ‘statistical gazes’ at different scales among labour administrators, bureaucratic officials, and statisticians. In studying the scientific-administrative issues of how and where statistics were produced and made credible, the analysis shows how authoritarian conceptions inscribed onto the files gave way, first, to more economical conceptions of data capturing (i.e. representative samples) and, from the late 1960s, to a statistical infrastructure based on electronic data processing. In examining the different rationalities – statistical-technical and political – the thesis shows how transformations in labour statistics were affected by dynamics between: federal state space and locality; technological dreams of labour administrators and statistical requirements; mathematisation and mechanisation of the statistical discourse; trust and credibility; public critique and legitimacy