Crowdsourcing as a Future Collaborative Computing Paradigm

Crowdsourcing coordinates a group of people called crowd, to perform small jobs that solve various problems (which computer systems or a single user could not easily solve). Crowdsourcing involves three components: tasks that need to be completed, workers that are recruited to complete tasks, and a platform that assigns workers to tasks and facilitates the completion of tasks. Since crowdsourcing is becoming more prevalent, in this chapter we try to understand and characterize crowdsourcing better through reviewing historical events, followed by some existing platforms that support crowdsourcing, as well as various crowdsourcing applications, and we end with a discussion of several algorithmically and theoretically challenging issues. We take a unique viewpoint of treating people in crowdsourcing as Human Processing Units (HPUs) in contrast to Central Processing Units (CPUs) in traditional computer systems. The comparison of HPU and CPU is analogous to the human vs. machine debate nowadays. We will provide our own insights on this debate.