Abstract

CrowdsourcingCrowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed ideas, services, or content by requesting contributions from a large group of people. Amazon Mechanical Turk is a web marketplace for crowdsourcing microtasks, such as answering surveys and image tagging. We explored the limits of crowdsourcing by using Mechanical Turk for a more complicated task: analysis and creation of wind simulations.Harnessing Crowdworkers for EngineeringOur investigation examined the feasibility of using crowdsourcing for complex, highly technical tasks. This was done to determine if the benefits of crowdsourcing could be harnessed to accurately and effectively contribute to solving complex real world engineering problems. Of course, untrained crowds cannot be used as a mere substitute for trained expertise. Rather, we sought to understand how crowd workers can be used as a large pool of labor for a preliminary analysis of complex data.Virtual Wind TunnelWe compared the skill of the anonymous crowd workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk with that of civil engineering graduate students, making a first pass at analyzing wind simulation data. For the first phase, we posted analysis questions to Amazon crowd workers and to two groups of civil engineering graduate students. A second phase of our experiment instructed crowd workers and students to create simulations on our Virtual Wind Tunnel website to solve a more complex task.ConclusionsWith a sufficiently comprehensive tutorial and compensation similar to typical crowd-sourcing wages, we were able to enlist crowd workers to effectively complete longer, more complex tasks with competence comparable to that of graduate students with more comprehensive, expert-level knowledge. Furthermore, more complex tasks require increased communication with the workers. As tasks become more complex, the employment relationship begins to become more akin to outsourcing than crowdsourcing. Through this investigation, we were able to stretch and explore the limits of crowdsourcing as a tool for solving complex problems.

Highlights

  • Citizen EngineeringCrowdsourcing, in recent years, has become one way to increase the supply of labor for problem solving tasks

  • The basic idea of crowdsourcing is that a lengthy task is divided into manageable pieces and these pieces are delivered to a large group of people to work on

  • We compared the skill of anonymous crowd workers of Amazon Mechanical Turk with the skill of trained graduate students in evaluating Virtual Wind Tunnel data

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Summary

Introduction

Citizen EngineeringCrowdsourcing, in recent years, has become one way to increase the supply of labor for problem solving tasks. The basic idea of crowdsourcing is that a lengthy task is divided into manageable pieces and these pieces are delivered to a large group of people to work on. These crowd workers might be compensated or act as volunteers. There can be concerns over the quality of the subsequent result, since the workers are basically a large group of strangers Often this is accounted for by making sure that the task is not too difficult and by having many workers independently work on the same thing, in order to verify results by consensus

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