Crowdsourcing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Crowdsourcing - Essay Example Most studies done on crowdsourcing have focused more on the quality of results and throughput with very or no attention on efficiency or the tradeoff therein. This is because; the number of tasks to be performed is usually very small. Additionally, the tasks performed by users are also small, and as a result, the techniques employed to guarantee result quality and scale the tasks that arise, does not tackle the aspect of efficiency. This paper aims at evaluating existing result-improvement mechanism, and proposes a novel technique that is independent of task complexities and size, but ensures efficiency and a tradeoff between quality of results and efficiency. Keywords: Efficiency; Throughput; Result Quality; Crowdsourcing; Data INTRODUCTION Crowdsourcing is very popular and has become very important for data collection-labeled data- that are dependent on human input to ensure quality of data as demonstrated by reCAPTCHA, Amazon Mechanical Turk, ESP game, and Netflix among others. Cr owdsourcing is the distribution of small chunks of large, complicated tasks to a large community of users over the internet who offers small contributions towards solving or offering a solution (Brabham 2008). In addition to data labeling, crowdsourcing has been utilized in double keying individual words, image labeling, word disambiguation and grading of word pairs that depict relatedness (Sautter & Bohm 2011). There are a number of challenges that arise from crowdsourcing including lack of guarantees for correctness with regards to human inputs. This can be as a result of accidental mistakes resulting from misjudgment or sloppiness. Sometimes, users may cheat to increase their chances of receiving a reward by cheating to reduce their effort. These challenges require development of crowdsourcing techniques that can ensure data quality, efficiency, counter errors, work with very large data sets, and yield high throughput. Previous studies and crowdsourcing mechanisms such as r-Redun dancy, have focused more on working with large tasks, countering errors, yielding high throughput and ensuring data quality (Eckert et al. 2010). This study, however, proposes novel techniques that are independent of task complexities and size but ensure efficiency and enables tradeoff between quality of results and efficiency. THE NEED FOR EFFICIENT CROWDSOURCING TECHNIQUES FOR COMPLEX TASKS Crowdsourcing mechanisms such as r-Redundancy, have focused more on working with large tasks, countering errors, yielding high throughput and ensuring data quality. They have assumed that most users offer meaningful and correct inputs. These mechanisms have ensured data quality, even in the presence of dishonesty, cheating and inability but do not discourage such a behavior (Wauthier & Jordan 2011). Therefore, a mechanism that probes users, is required, one that would not only ensure quality and high throughput, but ensure efficiency, as well. OVERVIEW OF EFFICIENT CROWDSOURCING TECHNIQUES FOR COMPLEX TASKS There are crowdsourcing techniques that combine error countering, data quality enforcement, and large tasks handling. v-Voting is one such mechanism that mostly focuses on countering errors (Alonso et al. 2008). It reduces the required number of inputs unlike r-Redundancy by obtaining inputs from different users and combining them to the final result. There is also Vote Boosting, which is a mechanism that builds on v-Voting to increases throughput