challenges and opportunities of applying social media to designing human computation systems and applications

1. Welcome, introduction and discussion
Jasminko Novak
Univ. of Applied Sciences Stralsund /
European Institute for Participatory Media, Berlin
Martha Larson
TU Delft, Multimedia Information Retrieval Lab
http://www.eipcm.org/sohuman2012
j.novak@eipcm.org
SoHuman2012 @IEEE Social Computing,Amsterdam, Sept 3, 2012

2. Goals of the workshop
Explore challenges and opportunities of applying social media
to designing human computation systems and applications
 Discuss practical challenges and experiences with applications of
social media to human computation
 Can we identify specific problem classes / use cases particularly
suited for new kinds of applications?
 Enrich the technology-driven perspective strongly present in AI
and multimedia retrieval with a user-centered view
 Stimulate the discussion on best-practices in this still young and
quickly growing field

3. Theme
Human Computation
 Human users as task-solvers within
computational systems
 Solving complex tasks that are easy for
humans but difficult for purely
computational approaches
 Requires large numbers of participants 
financial rewards, fun…
Social Media
 Support online social interaction,
information exchange, coordination and
collective action
 Can provide enabling methods and
technologies for human computation

4. Theme
Human Computation vs. Crowdsourcing
 “Whereas human computation replaces
computers with humans, crowdsourcing
replaces traditional human workers with
members of the public.”
 (Quinn & Bederson, 2011)
Human Computation vs. Social Media
 “…social computing facilitates relatively
natural human behavior that happens to be
mediated by technology, whereas participation
in a human computation is directed primarily Quinn, A.J. & Bederson, B.B. (2011).
Human Computation: A Survey and
by the human computation system.” Taxonomy of a Growing Field, Proc. of
 (ibid) CHI 2011

5. Approach
The need to interrelate social media research and human
computation is reflected in questions such as:
 How can we design effective incentive systems for large-scale
participation?
 How do we design tasks at different levels of complexity that can
still be solved reliably by individual contributions?
 How can we use social media techniques for new models of
coordination (e.g. social network analysis for task-routing)?
 How can lessons from distributed problem-solving in social
networks and collaborative systems lead to novel classes of
human computation tasks and applications?

6. Program

7. Acknowledgements
Organizers Prog. Commitee
 Jasminko Novak, Univ. of Applied  Apostolos Axenopoulos, CERTH
Sciences Stralsund / European  Klemens Boehm, Karlsruhe Institute of
Institute for Participatory Media Technology
 Marco Brambilla, Politecnico di Milano
 Martha Larson, Delft University of
 Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento
Technology, Multimedia Information
Retrieval Lab  Ido Guy, IBM Research
 Gareth Jones, Dublin City University
 Piero Fraternali, Politecnico di  Gabriella Kazai, Microsoft Research
Milano, Dipartimento di Elettronica
 Ville Miettinen, Microtask
ed Informazione
 Wolfgang Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT/RWTH Aachen
 Petros Daras, CERTH, Institute of  Alexander J. Quinn, Univ. of Maryland Coll. Park
Informatics and Telematics  Naeem Ramzan, Queen Mary University London
 Otto Chrons, Microtask Oy  Marcello Sarini, University of Milano-Bicocca
 Mohammad Soleymani, Geneva University
 Maja Vukovic, IBM T.J. Watson Research

8. Panel Discussion
Panel Members (The SoHuman 2012 Speakers)
Jiyin He, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Netherlands
Irene Celino, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Chris Harris, University of Iowa, USA
Luca Galli, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

9. Theme
Human Computation
 Human users as task-solvers within
computational systems
 Solving complex tasks that are easy for
humans but difficult for purely
computational approaches
 Requires large numbers of participants 
financial rewards, fun…
Social Media
 Support online social interaction,
information exchange, coordination and
collective action
 Can provide enabling methods and
technologies for human computation

10. What is Social Media?

11. Theme
Human Computation vs. Crowdsourcing
 “Whereas human computation replaces
computers with humans, crowdsourcing
replaces traditional human workers with
members of the public.”
 (Quinn & Bederson, 2011)
Human Computation vs. Social Media
 “…social computing facilitates relatively
natural human behavior that happens to be
mediated by technology, whereas participation
in a human computation is directed primarily Quinn, A.J. & Bederson, B.B. (2011).
Human Computation: A Survey and
by the human computation system.” Taxonomy of a Growing Field, Proc. of
 (ibid) CHI 2011

12. Panel Discussion
Do we really need
social media for
crowdsourcing?

13. Questions
• Do we really need social media for crowdsourcing?
• Do we understand all dimensions: Motivation,
Quality control, Aggregation, Human Skill (expert,
not expert), Process order (how to hybidize?)
• How do we enrich the technology-driven
perspective with a user-centered view?
• How do we move beyond the “mechanical” aspect
of crowdsourcing to make use of a full range of
human perspectives and abilities?
• How do we "invent" new applications for
crowdsourcing?
• What are the major risks moving forward?

14. Acknowledgements
Organizers Prog. Commitee
 Jasminko Novak, Univ. of Applied  Apostolos Axenopoulos, CERTH
Sciences Stralsund / European  Klemens Boehm, Karlsruhe Institute of
Institute for Participatory Media Technology
 Marco Brambilla, Politecnico di Milano
 Martha Larson, Delft University of
 Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento
Technology, Multimedia Information
Retrieval Lab  Ido Guy, IBM Research
 Gareth Jones, Dublin City University
 Piero Fraternali, Politecnico di  Gabriella Kazai, Microsoft Research
Milano, Dipartimento di Elettronica
 Ville Miettinen, Microtask
ed Informazione
 Wolfgang Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT/RWTH Aachen
 Petros Daras, CERTH, Institute of  Alexander J. Quinn, Univ. of Maryland Coll. Park
Informatics and Telematics  Naeem Ramzan, Queen Mary University London
 Otto Chrons, Microtask Oy  Marcello Sarini, University of Milano-Bicocca
 Mohammad Soleymani, Geneva University
 Maja Vukovic, IBM T.J. Watson Research