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.
The evaluation will consist of paper reviews and a final project.
Instructor: Jérôme Waldispühl
Lectures: Tuesday-Thursday 10:05am - 11:25am in McConnell 320.
Office hours: By appointement.
Paper Assignment: Schedule for paper presentation
Lecture 1 (January 9, 2013):
Introduction to Human-computation. [Slides in PDF]
Lecture 2 (January 15, 2013):
Designing Human-computation Algorithms. [Slides in PDF]
Lecture 3 (January 17, 2013):
Aggregating outputs. [Slides in PDF]
Lecture 4 (January 22, 2013):
Task routing. [Slides in PDF]
Lecture 5 (January 24, 2013):
Know your audience. [Slides in PDF]
Lecture 6 (January 29, 2013):
Paper and project presentation. A selection of paper is available here.
Lecture 7 (January 31, 2013):
The art of asking question. [Slides in PDF]
Lecture 8 (February 5, 2013):
“Leveraging human navigation in information networks to extract conceptual knowledge” by Doina Precup.
[Slides in PDF]
Lecture 9 (February 7, 2013):
“Analyzing social networks using the Amazon Mechanical Turk” by Derek Ruths. [Abstract]
Lecture 10 (February 12, 2013):
Scientific games.
Lecture 11 (February 14, 2013):
Office hours for Project assignments (in Trottier 3106).
Lecture 12 (February 19, 2013):
Invited Lecture: Éric Bourget.
Paper presentation (February 21 - April 2, 2013):
Schedule
Lecture 13 (February 26, 2013):
Departmental seminar: Edith Law.
Lecture 14 (February 28, 2013):
Departmental seminar: Yuval Filmus.
Lecture 15 (April 4, 2013):
Swarm computing.
Lecture 16 (April 9, 2013):
Discussion & conclusion.
Human Computation: An Integrated Approach to Learning from the Crowd
Edith Law, Luis von Ahn
Morgan & Claypool Publishers
Reinventing discovery: The new era of networked science
Michael Nielsen
Princeton University Press