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Crowdsourcing to Solve Big Problems

Crowdsourcing to Solve Big Problems. Gary M. Olson Department of Informatics. A Bit of Background. My background is in cognitive psychology BA U of Minnesota 1967 MA Stanford U 1968 PhD Stanford U 1970 Career: 1970-73 US Navy 1973-75 Michigan State U, Dept. of Psychology

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Crowdsourcing to Solve Big Problems

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  1. Crowdsourcing to Solve Big Problems Gary M. Olson Department of Informatics

  2. A Bit of Background • My background is in cognitive psychology • BA U of Minnesota 1967 • MA Stanford U 1968 • PhD Stanford U 1970 • Career: • 1970-73 US Navy • 1973-75 Michigan State U, Dept. of Psychology • 1975-2008 U of Michigan, Dept. of Psychology, then School of Information • 1983ish got into field of Human-Computer Interaction • Same year I married Judy Olson, with whom I have worked with since • 1994 joined the new School of Information • 2008-present UC Irvine, Dept. of Informatics • Interests: • Human-Computer Interaction • Computer Supported Cooperative Work • Information Visualization

  3. Crowdsourcing • Having members of the general public do a small thing that can be aggregated into something large and significant • Examples • Christmas bird count • Clickworkers • Galaxy Zoo • Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

  4. Galaxy Zoo • Images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey • Are galaxies spiral or elliptical • Essentially impossible for computer image software to determine • So people are doing it • Initial pass – 1.25 million galaxies classified • New wave looking at other characteristics • Galactic mergers • Supernovae • Solar storms

  5. Hanny van Arkel • Dutch schoolteacher • Discovered a new galaxy type • Using Galaxy Zoo • Called “Hanny’s Voorwerp”

  6. Crowdsourcing • Having members of the general public do a small thing that can be aggregated into something large and significant • Examples • Christmas bird count • Clickworkers • Galaxy Zoo • Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

  7. Climate CoLab • A project centered at MIT • Thomas Malone as leader • I’m involved in it as well • An attempt to raise the level of public discussion of climate change issues

  8. www.climatecolab.org

  9. Some Recent Findings • As of September, 2014 • 220,000 unique visits • 24,000 registered members • Surveys of users • Two demographic surveys • One on effects

  10. Challenge: Climate Change is an Example of a “Wicked Problem” • Can such a problem be successfully solved via crowdsourcing? • Existence proof: Several successful contests • Analogies: other “wicked” problems are being approached • Writing Wikipedia articles • Large scale contests like Innocentive • Climate Colab is an evolving research project • With the possibility of an important social impact

  11. Wisdom of Crowds

  12. Why Does This Work? • Surowiecki – draws on the larger literature on markets • Cognition • Coordination • Cooperation

  13. Criteria for Success Diversity of inputs – each contributor has their own unique input Independence – each contributor’s input is independent of others Decentralization – each contributor draws on their own analysis Aggregation – there is a way to merge all the contributions into a collective decision

  14. Failures of Collective Action Homogeneity – everyone thinks the same; Groupthink Centralization – Columbia shuttle disaster ignored inputs from engineers Division – 9/11 Commission Report faulted isolation of information Imitation – using past decisions Emotionality – peer pressure, etc.

  15. An Old Idea Princeton University Press, 2005

  16. Thank you – Questions? gary.olson@uci.edu

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