BPMN task instance streaming for efficient micro-task crowdsourcing processes

The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a standard for modeling and executing business processes with human or machine tasks. The semantics of tasks is usually discrete: a task has exactly one start event and one end event; for multi-instance tasks, all instances must complete before an end event is emitted. We propose a new task type and streaming connector for crowdsourcing able to run hundreds or thousands of micro-task instances in parallel. The two constructs provide for task streaming semantics that is new to BPMN, enable the modeling and efficient enactment of complex crowdsourcing scenarios, and are applicable also beyond the special case of crowdsourcing. We implement the necessary design and runtime support on top of Crowd- Flower, demonstrate the viability of the approach via a case study, and report on a set of runtime performance experiments

SmartCrowd: A Workflow Framework for Complex Crowdsourcing Tasks

Over the past decade, a number of frameworks have been introduced to support different crowdsourcing tasks. However, complex creative tasks have remained out of reach for workflow modeling. Unlike typical tasks, creative tasks are often interdependent, requiring human cognitive ability and team collaboration. The crowd workers are required not only to perform typical tasks, but also to participate in the analysis and manipulation of complex tasks, hence the number and execution order of tasks are unknown until runtime. Thus, it is difficult to model this kind of complex tasks by using existing workflow approaches. Therefore, we propose a workflow modeling approach based on state machine to design crowdsourcing model that can be translated into SCXML code and executed by an open source engine. This approach and engine are embodied in SmartCrowd. Through two evaluations, we found that SmartCrowd can provide support for complex crowdsourcing tasks, especially on creative tasks. Moreover, we introduce a set of basic design patterns, and by employing them to compose complex patterns, our framework can support more crowdsourcing research.</p

Elements of an automatic data scientist

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018. A simple but non-trivial setting for automating data science is introduced. Given are a set of worksheets in a spreadsheet and the goal is to automatically complete some values. We also outline elements of the Synth framework that tackles this task: Synth-a-Sizer, an automated data wrangling system for automatically transforming the problem into attribute-value format; TacLe, an inductive constraint learning system for inducing formulas in spreadsheets; Mercs, a versatile predictive learning system; as well as the autocompletion component that integrates these systems.status: publishe

Active automata learning in practice: An annotated bibliography of the years 2011 to 2016

Active automata learning is slowly becoming a standard tool in the toolbox of the software engineer. As systems become ever more complex and development becomes more distributed, inferred models of system behavior become an increasingly valuable asset for understanding and analyzing a system’s behavior. Five years ago (in 2011) we have surveyed the then current state of active automata learning research and applications of active automata learning in practice. We predicted four major topics to be addressed in the then near future: efficiency, expressivity of models, bridging the semantic gap between formal languages and analyzed components, and solutions to the inherent problem of incompleteness of active learning in black-box scenarios. In this paper we review the progress that has been made over the past five years, assess the status of active automata learning techniques with respect to applications in the field of software engineering, and present an updated agenda for future research