A budget-limited mechanism for category-aware crowdsourcing systems

Crowdsourcing harnesses human effort to solve computer-hard problems. Such tasks often have different levels of difficulty and workers have varying levels of skill at completing them. With a limited budget, it is important to wisely allocate the spend among the tasks and workers such that the overall outcome is as good as possible. Most existing work addresses this budget allocation problem by assuming that workers have a single level of ability for all tasks. However, this neglects the fact that tasks can belong to a variety of diverse categories and workers may have varying abilities across them. To incorporating such category-awareness, we model the interaction between the crowdsource campaign initiator and the workers as a procurement auction and propose a computationally efficient mechanism, INCARE, to achieve high-quality outcomes given a limited budget. We prove that INCARE is budget feasible, incentive compatible and individually rational. Finally, our experiments on a standard real-world data set show that, compared to the state of the art, INCARE: (i) can improve the accuracy by up to 40%, given a limited budget; and (ii) is significantly more robust to inaccuracies in prior information about each task's difficulty

Hazard ratios for 9 HT protocols, consisting of women who took HT at least 5 years, relative to a control group consisting of women who did not take any HT, 95% confidence intervals for the hazard ratios, and <i>p</i>-values obtained using the one-sided log-rank test, where the null hypothesis is that the area under the survival curve for the control group is smaller than or equal to the area under the survival curve for the HT group.

<p>Hazard ratios for 9 HT protocols, consisting of women who took HT at least 5 years, relative to a control group consisting of women who did not take any HT, 95% confidence intervals for the hazard ratios, and <i>p</i>-values obtained using the one-sided log-rank test, where the null hypothesis is that the area under the survival curve for the control group is smaller than or equal to the area under the survival curve for the HT group.</p

Hazard ratios for 9 HT protocols relative to a control group consisting of women who did not take any HT, 95% confidence intervals for the hazard ratios, and <i>p</i>-values obtained using the one-sided log-rank test, where the null hypothesis is that the area under the survival curve for the control group is smaller than or equal to the area under the survival curve for the HT group.

<p>Hazard ratios for 9 HT protocols relative to a control group consisting of women who did not take any HT, 95% confidence intervals for the hazard ratios, and <i>p</i>-values obtained using the one-sided log-rank test, where the null hypothesis is that the area under the survival curve for the control group is smaller than or equal to the area under the survival curve for the HT group.</p

Effect of <i>Cinnamomum cassia</i> (CIN) on life span in multiple pathway mutants of <i>C. elegans</i>.

<p>Age synchronized control (circles) or CIN fed (triangles) worms were seeded in liquid medium at the L1 stage. CIN treatment began 68 h after seeding (day 1 of adult life) and the fraction of animals alive was scored microscopically on the basis of movement. A. CIN significantly extends life span in wild type worms but not in B. <i>daf-16</i> C. <i>mev-1</i> or D. <i>ser-1</i> mutants. Survival rate was scored every day and is expressed as percentage of survival. The experiment was conducted at least three times with a minimum of 100 worms per trial. Statistical significant p<0.05, n.s. not significant.</p

Hazard ratios for 9 HT protocols, consisting of women who took HT at least 5 years, relative to a control group consisting of women who did not take any HT, 95% confidence intervals for the hazard ratios, and <i>p</i>-values obtained using the one-sided log-rank test, where the null hypothesis is that the area under the survival curve for the control group is smaller than or equal to the area under the survival curve for the HT group.

<p>Hazard ratios for 9 HT protocols, consisting of women who took HT at least 5 years, relative to a control group consisting of women who did not take any HT, 95% confidence intervals for the hazard ratios, and <i>p</i>-values obtained using the one-sided log-rank test, where the null hypothesis is that the area under the survival curve for the control group is smaller than or equal to the area under the survival curve for the HT group.</p

Visualization 2: In vivo volumetric fluorescence sectioning microscopy with mechanical-scan-free hybrid illumination imaging

C. Elegans Originally published in Biomedical Optics Express on 01 October 2016 (boe-7-10-3968

Kaplan-Meier plots for the 5 HT protocols found to significantly affect breast cancer in Table 2.

<p>Each graph also shows the plot for the control group consisting of women who did not take HT. Only women initiating drug usage after 01/01/2004 were included in the studies producing these results. The plots show the probability of surviving (not getting breast cancer) up to the amount of time after age 50.</p

Hazard ratios for women who used <i>CEE & MPA</i> versus women who used <i>Bioidentical Estrogen & Bioidentical Progesterone</i>, 95% confidence intervals for the hazard ratios, and <i>p</i>-values obtained using the one-sided log-rank test, where the null hypothesis is that the area under the survival curve for the bioidentical users is smaller than or equal to the area under the survival curve for the <i>CEE & MPA</i> users.

<p>Hazard ratios for women who used <i>CEE & MPA</i> versus women who used <i>Bioidentical Estrogen & Bioidentical Progesterone</i>, 95% confidence intervals for the hazard ratios, and <i>p</i>-values obtained using the one-sided log-rank test, where the null hypothesis is that the area under the survival curve for the bioidentical users is smaller than or equal to the area under the survival curve for the <i>CEE & MPA</i> users.</p

Visualization 1: In vivo volumetric fluorescence sectioning microscopy with mechanical-scan-free hybrid illumination imaging

Mixed Pollen Grains Originally published in Biomedical Optics Express on 01 October 2016 (boe-7-10-3968

Representative epifluorescence image of transgenic <i>C. elegans</i> (CL2070, hsp-16- 2/GFP) fed with or without herbs followed by a heat-shock treatment for 2 hr.

<p>CL2070 (hsp-16-2/GFP) worms, grown at 20°C, were treated with vehicle control (Ctrl), SQDB (100 µg/ml), GS, CIN (10 µg/ml) for 48 h starting at 2 days of age. The worms were exposed to 35°C for 2 h and transferred to 20°C for 4 h to recover before fluorescence microscopy. <i>Integrated Density</i> means the sum of the values of the pixels in the image or selection. For quantifying a population of GFP reporter animals, each 40× image was analyzed using Image J software. Data are expressed as GFP integrated pixel density obtained from at least three independent experiments with at least 10 worms in each experimental group. **Statistically significant (independent t test, P<0.01); ***statistically significant, P<0.001.</p