The ExCITe Center at Drexel University, August 20, 2013

3:00pm

Crowd-powered systems combine computation with human intelligence, drawn from large groups of people connecting and coordinating online. These hybrid systems enable applications and experiences that neither crowds nor computation could support alone.

Unfortunately, crowd work is error-prone and slow, making it difficult to incorporate crowds as first-order building blocks in software systems. Through this event, we introduced computational techniques that decompose complex tasks into simpler, verifiable steps to improve quality, and optimize work to return results in seconds. These techniques advance crowd-sourcing into a platform that is reliable and responsive to the point where crowds can be used in interactive systems.