Communications of the ACM
Turning Crowds Into Computers
Photo by Pablo Twose Vall
Researchers discussed the idea of building computers with human brains as the processing units at the recent CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Applications already under development include the Soylent editing plug-in, which breaks up documents into chunks, sends them to Mechanical Turk to tap into an online workforce for shortening or proofreading, and then automatically reassembles them back in Word. During the Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Human Computation, experts addressed ideas for other human-powered apps, such as a search engine that ranks images by cuteness and a plug-in for Photoshop that crops people or objects from an image. Tasks would involve things that humans can do online that computers find difficult.
The crowdsourcing field is still somewhat disorganized, and it has yet to be determined which software platform would be best for coordinating workers. "Today everyone is trying to build their own computer," says New York University's Panos Ipeirotis, who argues that a common operating system should be used for human computation.
From New Scientist
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