Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava,
Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies,
Institute of Informatics and Software Engineering
Human computation
Jakub Šimko
22.9.2010
[email protected]
Human computation
Humans can easily solve problems
impossible or hard for computers
 Our interest
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◦ Resource annotation (images, audio…)
◦ Ontology building

General purpose
◦ Virtually any pozriem, vidím problem 
But human cycles are precious…

How much do you evaluate your
manhour of tagging images (8 h/day)?
◦ At least 10 € netto for me 
Dog
Food
Bench
Backyard
…really that precious?
9 billion human-hours of Solitaire in 2003
 Excluding entertainment, games are
complete waste of human cycles

Game with a purpose (GWAP)
Gaming combined with problem solving
 Problem definition mapped to game task
 Successful game strategies and
solutions generated by players are
collected as problem solutions

ESP Game
(Google Image Labeller)
A game of image tagging
 2 anonymous players
 Players need to guess the same word
describing the picture

Player 1
Player 2
Puppy
Cute
Dog
Dog
Food
Bench
Backyard
Verbosity

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Game of collecting common facts (smelling
an ontology here  )
Asymetric game for 2 players
Player A is given a word: “milk”
Using predefined sentence templates, player A describes
the word:
◦ “It is a liquid”
◦ “It is usually found in the fridge”
Player B has to guess the original word
Manhattan Story Mashup

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Multi-player tagged image creation and story
mashup event
Online players and urban players distributed
in teams
Online team members write stories
Nouns are extracted and sent to the urban players
Urban team members take photos that best fit the nouns
Accuracy of photos is cross-validated by other players
Stories (enriched by photos) compete
Interesting sources
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http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143#
Ahn, L.v. and Dabbish, L. Designing games with a purpose.
Communications of the ACM 51, 8 (2008).
Krause, M., Takhtamysheva, A., Wittstock, M., and Malaka, R.
Frontiers of a paradigm: exploring human computation with digital
games. Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Human
Computation, ACM (2010), 22–25.
Siorpaes, K. and Hepp, M. Games with a Purpose for the Semantic
Web. IEEE Intelligent Systems 23, 3 (2008), 50-60.
Tuulos,V., Scheible, J., and Nyholm, H. Combining web, mobile
phones and public displays in large-scale: Manhattan story mashup.
Pervasive Computing, (2007).
What can we do?

Play Games with a Purpose (GWAP)
instead of normal games

Create a GWAP

Create a methodology for creating
GWAPs