Driven by Curiosity: Interaction Techniques and Incentive Mechanisms for Crowdsourcing Scientific Tasks

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Science is increasingly data-intensive; yet, many research tasks involving the collection, annotation and analysis of data are not yet fully automated by computers. The idea of citizen science is to engage massive number of people over the Web to contribute and process scientific data, to tackle problems where the scale, spread and complexity of the data is beyond the analytic capability of algorithms or the bandwidth of small teams.  The success of these citizen science platforms is in part due to an existing population of hobbyists (e.g., birders, amateur astronomers) who are already interested and eager to help. Unfortunately, the reverse scenario is actually more common - often scientists have research data and problems that are unfamiliar to most people, and struggle to transform labor intensive data processing tasks into something that is intrinsically motivating for participants to do. The lack of mechanisms for incentivizing and sustaining participation presents a major roadblock preventing citizen science systems from widespread adoption.