2. Definition
Crowd
Outsourcing
Crowdsourcing
• Crowdsourcing system enlists a crowd of humans to help solve a problem
defined by the system owners
• Compared to the physical world, the Web can dramatically improve existing CS
systems and give birth to novel systems types.
• The web is unique in that it can help recruit a large number of users, enable a
high degree of automation, and provide a large set of social software
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4. 4 Key Challenges for CS systems
How to recruit
and retain
users?
What
contributions
can users
make?
How to
combine user
contributions?
How to
evaluate
users and
contributions?
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5. Classifying Crowdsourcing
Nine dimensions of CS systems. The middle four refer respectively to how a CS
system solves the four fundamental challenges.
Degree of Manual
Effort
How to Recruit
and Retain Users
Role of Human
Users
What Can
Users Do
Nature of Collaboration
Standalone vs Piggyback
Architectures
How to Combine
Inputs
How to
Evaluate
Type of Target Problem
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6. What next?
Crowdsourcing is expected to grow rapidly in the near future in three major
directions:
• More Generic Platforms: the race is now on to move beyond building
individual systems, toward building general CS platforms.
• More Application and Structure: CS to be applied to ever more classes of
applications.
• More Users and Complex Contributions: engage ever broader range of users
and to enable them to make increasingly complex contributions.
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