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Blog Week 3 – Who (i.e. which companies & organizations) are active users of the technology and techniques in your topic area? What problems are they trying to solve?
Who Are Active Users of Crowdsourcing?
Various companies and organizations use crowdsourcing for different purposes. Some types of tasks can be solved by utilizing power of the crowd, and advanced companies actually solve their business problems. Crowdsourcing is often a powerful solution when the problem cannot be solved by computers effectively. In this article, we will explore the power of crowd with several remarkable case studies.
Use Human Brain instead of Computing Power
Nowadays, most of the simple and huge volume of tasks can be performed by computers. However, there are still some types of tasks that cannot be solved by computers very effectively. For example, computers are not good at choosing which picture is more beautiful, writing a good description about a product, or creating some artistic works. These are one type of situations where crowdsourcing can be useful. In 2005, Amazon launched a service named the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to solve these kinds of problems using human intelligence instead of computing power. This service has been originally developed for solving Amazon’s internal tasks, such as podcast transcribing, rating and image tagging. Then, it has been grown as a huge crowdsourcing platform. On the MTurk website, “Requesters” can offer tasks called Human Intelligent Tasks (HITs), and “Providers” can complete those tasks and earn monetary payment. Amazon reported that there were over 500,000 workers from over 190 countries as of January 2011.
Figure 1 – Amazon Mechanical Turk [2]
New Method for Data Generation and Collection
Another interesting case is a start-up data technology company called Premise, which uses crowdsourcing as one of their core value. Premise developing a new way for collecting business and economic data, such as price and ratings of food, grocery, clothing, etc., from all over the world by utilizing both online and offline information. What is unique for them is the way to collect offline information. They have asked ordinary citizens in each area to take picture of goods at grocery stores and to upload them using their mobile app. In such a way, they can know more accurate economic situation in specific regions in almost real time. This is one of a case where crowdsourcing is more actively used for core competence of a company rather than used for doing trivial tasks. Also, from the view point of data science, crowdsourcing is one of the ways to generate or collect dataset.
Figure 2 – Condition of Onions at a Market in Mumbai, India [4]
Crowdsourcing Most Intelligent Tasks
This list even goes further. Some companies have used crowdsourcing for solving their most intelligent tasks such as R&D. For example, Fiat, an Italian car maker, used crowd sourcing for car design. Fiat Mio became the world’s first crowdsourced vehicle. This type of crowdsourcing is also known as “open innovation”.
“Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology” [6]
In the domain of data science, one of the most notable cases would be the Netflix Prize. In October 2006, Netflix, an online movie rental service company, started a competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm to predict ratings for movies. By June 2007, over 20,000 teams had joined for the competition from over 150 countries. In September 2009, Netflix announced the grand champion and provider the prize of $1,000,000 for the winner.
Competitions on a web platform are a popular way to start this type of crowdsourcing. General Electric (GE) uses data analytics competition. For example, in 2012, GE held two data analytics competitions called “Flight Quest” and “Hospital Quest” on Kaggle website. GE held these competitions with its major clients aiming at solving business problems in airline industry and healthcare industry by using power of crowd. Another example is Sage Bionetworks’s Synapse, which is a crowdsourcing platform that especially focuses on clinical and genomics researches.
Figure 3 – A Competition on Synapse [9]
Summary
Crowdsourcing has been used to solve various types of business problems, and many private companies and research organizations use it in different ways. One of an interesting trend of crowdsourcing in data science field would open competitions held by major companies. Joining these kinds of competitions would be one of the good ways to improve your skills as a data scientist.
Reference
- Wikipedia, “Amazon Mechanical Turk”, Retrieved Apr 3, 2014 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk
- Amazon Mechanical Turk Website, Retrieved Apr 3, 2014 https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
3. Leena Rao, (Mar 13, 2014) “Real-Time Economic Data Tracking Platform Premise raises $11M from Social+Capital Partnership”, Retrieved Apr 3, 2014. http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/13/real-time-economic-data-tracking-platform-premise-raises-11m-from-socialcapital-partnership/
4. Premise Website Retrieved Apr 3, 2014 http://www.premise.com/index.htm
5. Eric Markowitz, (Sep 20, 2011) “The Case for Letting Your Customers Design Your Products”, Retrieved Apr 3, 2014 http://www.inc.com/guides/201109/how-to-crowdsource-your-resarch-and-development.html
6. Wikipedia, “Open Innovation”, Retrieved Apr 3, 201 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_innovation
7. Jeff Bertolucci (Apr 3, 2013) “GE Contests Shoot For Innovation Via Crowdsourcing”, Retrieved Apr 3, 2014 http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/big-data-analytics/ge-contests-shoot-for-innovation-via-crowdsourcing/d/d-id/1109369?
8. Cameron, (November 26, 2013) “4 Ways Crowdsourcing Can Revolutionize Pharma Development: Part 1 Research”, Retrieved Apr 3, 2014 http://www.totalbiopharma.com/2013/11/26/4-ways-crowdsourcing-revolutionise-pharma-development-part-1-research/
9. Sage Synapse Website Retrieved Apr 3, 201 https://www.synapse.org/