AF: Medium: Algorithmic Crowdsourcing Systems

众包指的是从全球工人中提取工作的范例，通常是小块的，每个人都动态地决定下一步完成哪个任务，以及为谁完成。众包系统本质上是算法的，因为协调任务将是压倒性的。算法取代了传统企业的管理和激励结构，负责优化工作流程，确定薪酬，将员工与任务匹配，以及员工和任务的学习模型。由于有可能改变生产力分配的方式，众包已经在广泛的领域中找到了应用，例如公民科学，文档转录，以及收集用于机器学习的训练数据，以弥合与人类水平智能的差距。 该项目的目标是为众包系统的设计开发一个算法和激励机制的内聚理论，该研究旨在解决利用分散的资源和能力进行生产性工作的关键挑战，并寻求开发一个理论框架，以指导众包系统的设计，使其具有一致的激励机制，具有自适应性和鲁棒性，并以低成本实现高性能。 研究人员对匹配和定价的作用感兴趣，在开发方法以获得高质量，无法验证的贡献，并在拥抱现实的人类行为模型。研究人员将在即将举行的电子商务会议（EC13和EC14）上组织关于社会计算的研讨会，他们将继续招募妇女和其他代表性不足的群体加入该项目。

Crowdsourcing refers to the paradigm of eliciting work, typically in small pieces, from a global population of workers, each making dynamic decisions about which task to complete next, and for whom. Crowdsourcing systems are inherently algorithmic because the coordination task would otherwise be overwhelming. Algorithms take the place of the management and incentive structure of traditional firms, responsible for optimizing workflows, determining payments, matching workers with tasks, and learning models of workers and tasks.With the potential to transform the way in which productive effort is allocated, crowdsourcing is already finding application across a broad range of domains, such as citizen science, the transcription of documents, and collecting training data for use in machine learning for bridging the gap to human-level intelligence.  The goal of this project is to develop a cohesive theory of algorithms and incentives for the design of crowdsourcing systems.The proposed research addresses key challenges in harnessing decentralized resources and capabilities for productive work, and seeks to develop a theoretical framework to guide the design of crowdsourcing systems that align incentives, are adaptive and robust, and achieve high performance for low cost.  The investigators are interested in the roles of matching and pricing, in developing methods for eliciting high quality, unverifiable contributions, and in embracing realistic models of human behavior.The investigators will organize workshops on social computing at upcoming Conferences on Electronic Commerce (EC13 and EC14) and they continue to recruit women and other under-represented groups to join the project.