COMP- 766: ADVANCED TOPICS: An introduction to crowdsourcing and human-computing techniques

Course Summary

Syllabus: Initiatives such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and OpenStreetMaps have proven that crowd-sourcing and human-computing techniques are valuable ways to both analyze and annotate large datasets that require human expertise as well as to solve problems that are difficult to treat with classical computer algorithms. Distributed computing platforms such as a SETI@home or Scientific games like Galaxy Zoo, Foldit and Phylo illustrate the potential of these techniques for studying, mining, and processing scientific data. This course aims to provide an introduction to the emerging field of human computation and to discuss its impact on the scientific discovery processes. We will study existing platforms and review related theoretical frameworks. Finally, we will discuss the perspectives offered by new mobile computing technologies.