Crowdsourcing: A Survey of Applications

Abstract

Crowdsourcing, itself a multidisciplinary field, can be well-served by incorporating theories and methods from affective computing. We present a various applications which are based on crowdsourcing. The direction of research on principles and methods can enable to solve a general problem via human computation systems. Crowdsourcing is nothing but an act of outsourcing tasks to a large group of people through an open request via the Internet. It has become popular among social scientists as a source to recruit research participants from the general public for studies. Crowdsourcing is introduced as the new online distributed problem solving model in which networked people collaborate to complete a task and produce the result. However, the idea of crowdsourcing is not new, and can be traced back to Charles Darwin. Darwin was interested in studying the universality of facial expressions in conveying emotions. For this, it required large amount of database and for this he had to consider a global population to get more general conclusions. This paper provides an introduction to crowdsourcing, guidelines for using crowdsourcing, and its applications in various fields. Finally, this article proposes conclusion which is based upon applications of crowdsourcing.

Keywords: Crowdsourcing, Mechanical Turk, Human Intelligence Tasks, General Computation, Human Program Synthesis, Emergency Management, Volunteered Geographic Information, Crowdsourcing, Web 2.0, Wildfire

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