crowdsourcing to solve big problems gary m. olson department of informatics
TRANSCRIPT
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
– 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
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
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
Hanny van Arkel
Dutch schoolteacher Discovered a new galaxy type
– Using Galaxy Zoo– Called “Hanny’s Voorwerp”
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
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
www.climatecolab.org
Some Recent Findings
As of September, 2014– 220,000 unique visits– 24,000 registered members
Surveys of users– Two demographic surveys– One on effects
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
Wisdom of Crowds
Why Does This Work?
Surowiecki – draws on the larger literature on markets– Cognition– Coordination– Cooperation
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
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.
An Old Idea
Princeton University Press, 2005
