EECS Department Colloquium Series
Planning to Control Crowd-Sourced Workflows
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Wednesday, November 12, 2014 Dan Weld |
ABSTRACT:
Crowd-sourcing labor markets (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk)
are booming, because they enable rapid construction of complex
work.ows that seamlessly mix human computation with computer
automation. Example applications range from photo tagging to
audio-visual transcription and interlingual translation.
Unfortunately, constructing a good workflow is difficult, because the
quality of the work performed by humans is highly variable. Typically,
a task designer will experiment with several alternative work.ows to
accomplish a task, varying the amount of redundant labor, until she
devises a control strategy which delivers acceptable performance.
Fortunately, this control challenge can often be formulated as an
automated planning problem. ripe for algorithms from the probabilistic
planning and reinforcement learning literature. This talk describes
our recent work on the decision-theoretic control of crowd sourcing
and suggests open problems for future research.
BIOGRAPHY:
Daniel S. Weld is Thomas J. Cable / WRF Professor of
Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Weld
received a BS from Yale in 1982, a PhD from MIT in 1988, a
Presidential Young Investigator.s award in 1989, an Office of Naval
Research Young Investigator.s award in 1990, was named AAAI Fellow in
1999, and ACM Fellow in 2006. Weld is also an active entrepreneur with
several patents and technology licenses. In May 1996, he co-founded
Netbot, creator of Jango Shopping Search, later acquired by Excite. In
October 1998, Weld co-founded AdRelevance, a monitoring service for
internet advertising, which was acquired by Media Metrix and is now
operated by Nielsen NetRatings. In June 1999, Weld co-founded data
integration company Nimble Technology which was acquired by the
Actuate Corporation. In January 2001, Weld joined the Madrona Venture
Group as a Venture Partner and member of the Technical Advisory Board.
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