Decision-Theoretic Control for Crowdsourced Workflows

Crowd-sourcing is a recent framework in which human intelligence tasks are outsourced to a crowd of unknown people (”workers”) as an open call (e.g., on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk). Crowd-sourcing has become immensely popular with hoards of employers (”requesters”), who use it to solve a wide variety of jobs, such as dictation transcription, content screening, etc. In order to achieve quality results, requesters often subdivide a large task into a chain of bite-sized sub-tasks that are combined into a complex, iterative workflow in which workers check and improve each other’s results. This project raises an exciting question for AI — could an autonomous agent control these workflows without human intervention, yielding better results than today’s state of the art, a fixed control program?

Publications

Artificial Intelligence for Artificial Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence for Artificial Artificial Intelligence
Peng Dai, Mausam and Daniel S. Weld
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2011. Full Paper (PDF)
Artificial Intelligence for Artificial Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence for Artificial Artificial Intelligence
Peng Dai, Mausam and Daniel S. Weld
Human Computation Workshop, 2011. Full Paper (PDF)
Human Intelligence Needs Artificial Intelligence Human Intelligence Needs Artificial Intelligence
Daniel S. Weld, Mausam and Peng Dai
Human Computation Workshop, 2011. Full Paper (PDF)
Decision-Theoretic Control for Crowdsourced Workflows Decision-Theoretic Control for Crowdsourced Workflows
Peng Dai, Mausam and Daniel S. Weld
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2010. Full Paper (PDF)