Talk by Edith Law - Host: Cristina Conati

Title:      " Human Computation: Core Research Questions and Opportunities"

Abstract: Human computation is the study of systems where humans perform amajor part of the computation or are an integral part of the overall computational process. With the growth of the Web, human computation systems can now harness the intelligence of a large number of people to tackle difficult problems that cannot yet be solved by existing AI algorithms. There exist several genres of human computation systems -- Games With a Purpose (e.g., the ESP Game) collect data from humans as a by-product of game play; crowdsourcing marketplaces (e.g. Amazon Mechanical Turk) enable algorithmic operations to be outsourced to paid workers in the form of micro-tasks; identity verification tasks (e.g., reCAPTCHA) leverage the help of billions of users who, in the process of gaining access to online content, are engaged in meaningful activities (e.g., digitizing books). In this talk, I will give an overview of the core research questions and opportunities in human computation, illustrated by a few examples -- including TagATune and Polarity (which are games for extracting object attributes), and CrowdSearch (which is a human computation algorithm for answering high-level search queries).  

Bio: Edith Law is a Ph.D. candidate in the Dept. of Machine Learning, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. Edith  is doing research on human computation systems that harness the joint efforts of machines and humans, particularly in the context of games. She is the co-organizer of HCOMP 2009 (at KDD) and 2011 (at AAAI), and the recipient of the Microsoft Graduate Research Fellowship 2009–2011.