EAGER: Programming the Crowd

人们可以轻松地执行许多对计算机来说仍然困难或不可能的任务，包括视觉，运动规划和自然语言理解。新的“众包”平台，如亚马逊的土耳其机器人，通过简化工作发布、跟踪和工人支付，比以往任何时候都更容易利用人类的计算能力。然而，缺乏自动化意味着众包目前没有扩大规模。低质量的结果必须被过滤掉，但检查人类计算可能很困难。经济激励和匿名性使众包容易受到欺诈。决定为特定任务支付多少工资以及雇佣多少工人仍然是一门艺术。这个项目引入了众编程，一种完全整合人类和数字计算的方法。在众编程中，人类被建模为标准编程语言中的函数调用。这种方法让程序员专注于编程逻辑，而众编程运行时系统管理成本，时间和数据质量之间的关键权衡。众编程将大大降低利用人类计算能力的障碍。它将使一个丰富的新类别的应用程序，分工之间的数字和人类计算，其中计算机和人类做的工作，每个做得最好。它将实现人工计算的复杂编排，自动控制质量以保持高准确性并避免欺诈，并安排任务和调整付款，以在保持预算的同时最大限度地提高速度。通过简化将人类劳动力纳入计算的过程，众包编程有可能为经济增加一个全新的就业部门。

People can perform with ease many tasks that remain difficult or impossible for computers, including vision, motion planning, and natural language understanding. New "crowdsourcing" platforms like Amazon's Mechanical Turk make it easier than ever to harness human computational power by streamlining job posting, tracking, and payment for workers. However, the lack of automation means that crowdsourcing currently does not scale up. Low quality results must be filtered out, but checking human computations can be difficult. Economic incentives and anonymity expose crowdsourcing to fraud. Deciding how much to pay workers for particular tasks and how many workers to hire remains an art.This project introduces crowdprogramming, an approach that fully integrates human and digital computation. In crowdprogramming, humans are modeled as function calls in a standard programming language. This approach lets programmers focus on programming logic, while the crowdprogramming runtime system manages the critical tradeoffs between cost, time, and data quality. Crowdprogramming will dramatically lower the barriers to harnessing human computational power. It will enable a rich new class of applications that divide labor between digital and human computations, where computers and humans do the work each does best. It will enable complex orchestration of human computations, automatically control quality to maintain high accuracy and avoid fraud, and schedule tasks and adjust payments to maximize speed while staying within budget. By streamlining the incorporation of human labor into computation, crowdprogramming has the potential to add an entirely new job sector to the economy.