Crowd-powered systems

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 217-237).Crowd-powered systems combine computation with human intelligence, drawn from large groups of people connecting and coordinating online. These hybrid systems enable applications and experiences that neither crowds nor computation could support alone. Unfortunately, crowd work is error-prone and slow, making it difficult to incorporate crowds as first-order building blocks in software systems. I introduce computational techniques that decompose complex tasks into simpler, verifiable steps to improve quality, and optimize work to return results in seconds. These techniques develop crowdsourcing as a platform so that it is reliable and responsive enough to be used in interactive systems. This thesis develops these ideas through a series of crowd-powered systems. The first, Soylent, is a word processor that uses paid micro-contributions to aid writing tasks such as text shortening and proofreading. Using Soylent is like having access to an entire editorial staff as you write. The second system, Adrenaline, is a camera that uses crowds to help amateur photographers capture the exact right moment for a photo. It finds the best smile and catches subjects in mid-air jumps, all in realtime. Moving beyond generic knowledge and paid crowds, I introduce techniques to motivate a social network that has specific expertise, and techniques to data mine crowd activity traces in support of a large number of uncommon user goals. These systems point to a future where social and crowd intelligence are central elements of interaction, software, and computation.by Michael Scott Bernstein.Ph.D

MethodsNews Summer 2011

Contents: Social simulation and policy making, by Christopher Watts; Crowdsourcing opening up new opportunities, by Andy Hudson-Smith; Multimodality and communication, by Carey Jewitt and Jeff Bezemer; Ethnic dealignment? Improving estimates of the change in ethnic voting between the 2001 and 2005 British General Elections, by Nicky Best, Jane Holmes and Stephen D. Fisher; Methodological challenges in researching ethnicity, by Angela Dale, James Nazroo, Lucinda Platt and Sarah Salway; runmlwin: New software to run MLwiN from within Stata, by George Leckie and Chris Charlton; Assessing UK academics’ research methods training needs, by Rose Wiles; Methods at Plymouth University; ESRC Chief Executive: We should make better use of administrative data in research; 5th ESRC Research Methods Festival,2-5 July 2012 at St Catherine’s College Oxfor

Theaters of Citizenship

Theaters of Citizenship investigates the Egyptian movement for free theater, arguing that it evolved from an avant-gardist movement to an undercommons of revolutionary cultural practice. Using historiography, ethnography, and performance analysis, the book tells a story of this avant-garde from 2004-2014, analyzing its staging of rights claims, generational identity politics, and post-revolution citizenship. Using Moten and Harney’s theory of the undercommons, a space-time for politicized cultural practice, the book extends avant-gardist theater theory to consider the revolutionary potential of performance within and outside theater spaces. Pahwa considers the performer’s bodily repertoire as a medium of cultural and political citizenship, drawing on Diana Taylor’s concept of repertoire, and expanding it to account for how performance mediates futurist culture and revolutionary practice

'If I could be equall with Solomon...' - Ecclesiastes and English practical divinity c.1590, with particular reference to Henry Smith & George Gifford

The book of Ecclesiastes is a scripture that has been notoriously vexing and endlessly inspiring to Christians and students of Christianity through the ages, and it has been a standout text in the diachronic study of biblical reception. Nevertheless, there is no dearth of problems, questions, potential advances, and needful correctives that remain outstanding. One such set of issues relates to the reception of the scripture in sixteenth century England. When the Tudor dynasty began, interest in Ecclesiastes was limited, mainly to humanist scholars and the upper echelons of English society. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, it had emerged as a focus of engagement, worldly application, and personal emulation for all, from puritan and conformist divines to London liverymen and independent craftswomen, from governing intellectuals like Francis Bacon to social outliers like the author(s) of Hæc-Vir. To date, the relevant historiographies have largely bypassed this arc of change. The present thesis is an interdisciplinary study that identifies bands added to this arc of change by the generation of certain scripted prayers and sermons delivered c.1590 by the puritan ministers Henry Smith and George Gifford. Treating these materials as events of the imagination as well as texts, it also ascertains specific modes of their enduring influences, and argues that they were the vanguard of historically significant evolutions in the reception of Ecclesiastes that both deepened the scripture’s role in English practical divinity and had wider, abiding effects on English thought and expression well into the seventeenth century. Refinements to current scholarship are also offered, such as further pruning to the origins of the Victorine (Hugh of St Victor) influence on Reformed exegesis of vanitas. Certain bibliographical correctives are suggested as well, such as the place and importance of The Books of Homilies in the pre-1590 reception of Ecclesiastes

Knowledge-Based Techniques for Scholarly Data Access: Towards Automatic Curation

Accessing up-to-date and quality scientific literature is a critical preliminary step in any research activity. Identifying relevant scholarly literature for the extents of a given task or application is, however a complex and time consuming activity. Despite the large number of tools developed over the years to support scholars in their literature surveying activity, such as Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic search, and others, the best way to access quality papers remains asking a domain expert who is actively involved in the field and knows research trends and directions. State of the art systems, in fact, either do not allow exploratory search activity, such as identifying the active research directions within a given topic, or do not offer proactive features, such as content recommendation, which are both critical to researchers. To overcome these limitations, we strongly advocate a paradigm shift in the development of scholarly data access tools: moving from traditional information retrieval and filtering tools towards automated agents able to make sense of the textual content of published papers and therefore monitor the state of the art. Building such a system is however a complex task that implies tackling non trivial problems in the fields of Natural Language Processing, Big Data Analysis, User Modelling, and Information Filtering. In this work, we introduce the concept of Automatic Curator System and present its fundamental components.openDottorato di ricerca in InformaticaopenDe Nart, Dari

Aging Experiments: Futures and Fantasies of Old Age

The sustained expansion of the life span and the attendant demographic changes in the West have fuelled the production of cultural texts that explore alternative representations of aging and old age. The contributors to this volume show how artists in science-fiction, fantasy and the avant-garde develop visions of late life transformation, improvisation and adaptation to new circumstances. The studies particularly focus on perspectives on aging that challenge the predominant narratives of decline as well as fantasies of eternal youth, as defined by neoliberal notions of health, able-bodiedness, agency, self-improvement, progress, plasticity and productivity