Prof. Michael Bernstein, Stanford, USA

Crowdsourcing a Meeting of Minds
Crowdsourcing is an increasingly powerful method for combining amateurs' efforts to recreate an expert's abilities. However, across domains from design to engineering to art, few goals are truly the effort of just one person — even one expert. If we can now crowdsource simple tasks such as image labeling, how might we coordinate many peoples' abilities toward far more complex and interdependent goals? In this talk, I present computational systems for gathering and guiding crowds of experts --- including professional programmers, designers, singers and artists. The resulting collectives tackle problems modularly and at scale, dynamically grow and shrink depending on task demands, and combine into larger organizations. I'll demonstrate how these expert crowds, which we call Flash Teams, can pursue goals such as designing new user experiences overnight and producing animated shorts in two days.

The overview talk — Thinking Big with Collective Intelligence
In nine hours, a team successfully scoured the entire United States to find a set of red balloons worth forty thousand dollars. In three weeks, citizen scientists playing a game uncovered the structure of an enzyme that had eluded scientists for over fifteen years. In ten years, millions of people authored the most expansive encyclopedia in human history. If interconnected people and computers can accomplish these goals in hours, days, and years, what might be possible in the next years or decade? Intelligence is not just something that arises inside individual brains--it also arises in groups of individuals, known as collective intelligence. Disciplines from neuroscience to economics to biology are making fundamental breakthroughs in understanding how groups of individuals can collectively do intelligent things. And reciprocally, these disciplines have begun contributing to each other: computer science concepts such as internet protocol algorithms accurately model ant colony food foraging behavior4, and social computing blogging platforms became the site of a massive distributed math proof led by two Fields medalists and over forty other mathematicians. Could collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds transform us into more effective scientists, citizens and decision-makers than any group of experts are today? Or are we doomed to groupthink and statistically popular but uninventive ideas?

Tutorial: How to Use Amazon Mechanical Turk
n this tutorial, I'll introduce the basics of using Amazon Mechanical Turk to run crowdsourcing experiments. Bring your laptops! Sign up for a Mechanical Turk requester account in advance — it takes a few days to get approved.