acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

ACM TechNews

Turning Crowds Into Computers


View as: Print Mobile App Share:
crowd of people

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
View Full Article

Abstracts Copyright © 2011 Information Inc. External Link, Bethesda, Maryland, USA 

 


 

No entries found

Sign In for Full Access
» Forgot Password? » Create an ACM Web Account