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

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

Thank you – Questions?

[email protected]