95 research outputs found
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
Interactive Data Exploration with Smart Drill-Down
We present {\em smart drill-down}, an operator for interactively exploring a
relational table to discover and summarize "interesting" groups of tuples. Each
group of tuples is described by a {\em rule}. For instance, the rule tells us that there are a thousand tuples with value in the
first column and in the second column (and any value in the third column).
Smart drill-down presents an analyst with a list of rules that together
describe interesting aspects of the table. The analyst can tailor the
definition of interesting, and can interactively apply smart drill-down on an
existing rule to explore that part of the table. We demonstrate that the
underlying optimization problems are {\sc NP-Hard}, and describe an algorithm
for finding the approximately optimal list of rules to display when the user
uses a smart drill-down, and a dynamic sampling scheme for efficiently
interacting with large tables. Finally, we perform experiments on real datasets
on our experimental prototype to demonstrate the usefulness of smart drill-down
and study the performance of our algorithms
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