GNM2012: Harvesting the Wisdom of Crowds

  • Yoram Bachrach | Microsoft Research

Conventional wisdom has it that a crowd is smarter than a single individual, and that many opinions are better than one. Several successful businesses have been formed based on this crowdsourcing theme, such as Wikipedia, InTrade and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

The notion of crowd intelligence is very appealing, but raises many questions:
Can the thoughts of single individuals really be aggregated into one giant mind?
Can a crowd outperform its strongest member?
What really makes a crowd tick, and what determines how well a crowd can succeed in a task?
How can we incentivize crowd members to work hard, and determine the individual contribution of a member towards the performance of the entire crowd?

We will examine several experiments designed to shed some light on the above questions, both in a controlled lab setting and in real-world crowdsourcing platforms.

Speaker Details

Yoram Bachrach is currently graduating a PhD in computer science, in the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. He is a part of the Multiagent Systems research group (CriticalMAS), where he explores methods of building intelligent autonomous agents that can work together. His reseach interests include artificial intelligence and computational economics, and he has published several papers focusing on interactions among self interested agents and manipulating collaborative decision making systems.

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