Human Computation

Human computation is a new and evolving research area that centers around harnessing human intelligence to solve computational problems that are beyond the scope of existing Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. With the growth of the Web, human computation systems can now leverage the abilities of an unprecedented number of people via the Web to perform complex computation. There are various genres of human computation applications that exist today. Games with a purpose (e.g., the ESP Game) specifically target online gamers who generate useful data (e.g., image tags) while playing an enjoyable game. Crowdsourcing marketplaces (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk) are human computation systems that coordinate workers to perform tasks in exchange for monetary rewards. In identity verification tasks, users perform computation in order to gain access to some online content; an example is reCAPTCHA, which leverages millions of users who solve CAPTCHAs every day to correct words in books that optical character recognition (OCR) programs fail to recognize with certainty. This book is aimed at achieving four goals: (1) defining human computation as a research area; (2) providing a comprehensive review of existing work; (3) drawing connections to a wide variety of disciplines, including AI, Machine Learning, HCI, Mechanism/Market Design and Psychology, and capturing their unique perspectives on the core research questions in human computation; and (4) suggesting promising research directions for the future. Table of Contents: Introduction / Human Computation Algorithms / Aggregating Outputs / Task Routing / Understanding Workers and Requesters / The Art of Asking Questions / The Future of Human Computation

This volume addresses the emerging area of human computation, The chapters, written by leading international researchers, explore existing and future opportunities to combine the respective strengths of both humans and machines in order to create powerful problem-solving capabilities. The book bridges scientific communities, capturing and integrating the unique perspective and achievements of each. It coalesces contributions from industry and across related disciplines in order to motivate, define, and anticipate the future of this exciting new frontier in science and cultural evolution. Readers can expect to find valuable contributions covering Foundations; Application Domains; Techniques and Modalities; Infrastructure and Architecture; Algorithms; Participation; Analysis; Policy and Security and the Impact of Human Computation. Researchers and professionals will find the Handbook of Human Computation a valuable reference tool. The breadth of content also provides a thorough foundation for students of the field.

By paying close attention to the metaphors of artificial intelligence and their consequences for the field's patterns of success and failure, this text argues for a reorientation of the field away from thought and toward activity. It offers a critical reconstruction of AI research.

Human computation is a new and evolving research area that centers around harnessing human intelligence to solve computational problems that are beyond the scope of existing Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. With the growth of the Web, human computation systems can now leverage the abilities of an unprecedented number of people via the Web to perform complex computation. There are various genres of human computation applications that exist today. Games with a purpose (e.g., the ESP Game) specifically target online gamers who generate useful data (e.g., image tags) while playing an enjoyable game. Crowdsourcing marketplaces (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk) are human computation systems that coordinate workers to perform tasks in exchange for monetary rewards. In identity verification tasks, users perform computation in order to gain access to some online content; an example is reCAPTCHA, which leverages millions of users who solve CAPTCHAs every day to correct words in books that optical character recognition (OCR) programs fail to recognize with certainty. This book is aimed at achieving four goals: (1) defining human computation as a research area; (2) providing a comprehensive review of existing work; (3) drawing connections to a wide variety of disciplines, including AI, Machine Learning, HCI, Mechanism/Market Design and Psychology, and capturing their unique perspectives on the core research questions in human computation; and (4) suggesting promising research directions for the future. Table of Contents: Introduction / Human Computation Algorithms / Aggregating Outputs / Task Routing / Understanding Workers and Requesters / The Art of Asking Questions / The Future of Human Computation

This distinguished collection of essays explores the place of natural language in human cognition.

How can human-level artificial intelligence be achieved? What are the potential consequences? This book describes a research approach toward achieving human-level AI, combining a doctoral thesis and research papers by the author. The research approach, called TalaMind, involves developing an AI system that uses a 'natural language of thought' based on the unconstrained syntax of a language such as English; designing the system as a collection of concepts that can create and modify concepts to behave intelligently in an environment; and using methods from cognitive linguistics for multiple levels of mental representation. Proposing a design-inspection alternative to the Turing Test, these pages discuss 'higher-level mentalities' of human intelligence, which include natural language understanding, higher-level forms of learning and reasoning, imagination, and consciousness. Dr. Jackson gives a comprehensive review of other research, addresses theoretical objections to the proposed approach and to achieving human-level AI in principle, and describes a prototype system that illustrates the potential of the approach. This book discusses economic risks and benefits of AI, considers how to ensure that human-level AI and superintelligence will be beneficial for humanity, and gives reasons why human-level AI may be necessary for humanity's survival and prosperity.

The exponential progress and accessibility of computing has vastly increased data flows and revolutionized the practice of science, engineering, and communication. Computing plays a critical role in advancing research across almost every scientific discipline. Computation for Humanity: Information Technology to Advance Society is a guide for the creation of services, products, and tools that facilitate, support, and enhance progress of humanity toward more sustainable life. This book: Provides a deep understanding of the practical applications of computation to solve human-machine problems Delivers insight into theoretical approaches in an accessible manner Provides a comprehensive overview of computational science and engineering applications in selected disciplines Crosses the boundaries between different domains and shows how they interrelate and complement one another Focuses on grand challenges and issues that matter for the future of humanity Shows different perspectives of computational thinking, understanding, and reasoning Provides a basis for scientific discoveries and enables adopting scientific theories and engineering practices from other disciplines Takes a step back to provide a human-related abstraction level that is not ultimately seen in pure technological elaborations/collections The editors provide a collection of numerous computation-related projects that form a foundation from which to cross-pollinate between different disciplines and further extensive collaboration. They present a clear and profound understanding of computing in today's world, and provide fundamental solutions to some of the most pertinent humanity-related problems.

This book presents computational interaction as an approach to explaining and enhancing the interaction between humans and information technology. Computational interaction applies abstraction, automation, and analysis to inform our understanding of the structure of interaction and also to inform the design of the software that drives new and exciting human-computer interfaces. The methods of computational interaction allow, for example, designers to identify user interfaces that are optimal against some objective criteria. They also allow software engineers to build interactive systems that adapt their behaviour to better suit individual capacities and preferences. Embedded in an iterative design process, computational interaction has the potential to complement human strengths and provide methods for generating inspiring and elegant designs. Computational interaction does not exclude the messy and complicated behaviour of humans, rather it embraces it by, for example, using models that are sensitive to uncertainty and that capture subtle variations between individual users. It also promotes the idea that there are many aspects of interaction that can be augmented by algorithms. This book introduces computational interaction design to the reader by exploring a wide range of computational interaction techniques, strategies and methods. It explains how techniques such as optimisation, economic modelling, machine learning, control theory, formal methods, cognitive models and statistical language processing can be used to model interaction and design more expressive, efficient and versatile interaction.

Cognitive Computing for Human-Robot Interaction: Principles and Practices explores the efforts that should ultimately enable society to take advantage of the often-heralded potential of robots to provide economical and sustainable computing applications. This book discusses each of these applications, presents working implementations, and combines coherent and original deliberative architecture for human–robot interactions (HRI). Supported by experimental results, it shows how explicit knowledge management promises to be instrumental in building richer and more natural HRI, by pushing for pervasive, human-level semantics within the robot's deliberative system for sustainable computing applications. This book will be of special interest to academics, postgraduate students, and researchers working in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Key features: Introduces several new contributions to the representation and management of humans in autonomous robotic systems; Explores the potential of cognitive computing, robots, and HRI to generate a deeper understanding and to provide a better contribution from robots to society; Engages with the potential repercussions of cognitive computing and HRI in the real world. Introduces several new contributions to the representation and management of humans in an autonomous robotic system Explores cognitive computing, robots and HRI, presenting a more in-depth understanding to make robots better for society Gives a challenging approach to those several repercussions of cognitive computing and HRI in the actual global scenario