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Crowdsourcing in Life Science Research. Divya Mistry 4/22/2011. Crowdsourcing. Crowd + Outsourcing Outsourcing a task or its subparts to individuals in a crowd who aren’t part of research group. Crowd consists of volunteers replying to “open call”
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Crowdsourcing in Life Science Research DivyaMistry 4/22/2011
Crowdsourcing • Crowd + Outsourcing • Outsourcing a task or its subparts to individuals in a crowdwho aren’t part of research group. • Crowd consists of • volunteers replying to “open call” • individuals, who are paid a small amount • Indirectly gathering live data from humans (e.g. twitter) • Wisdom of the crowd • Answering question through collective opinion instead of just an expert.
Crowdsourcing in Science • 2 popular examples • Passive contribution • Active contribution • What they have in common • Cost of entry is practically zero. • Purpose of the project is understandable to common person • Burden of analysis/verification is not on participant
Tools for Crowdsourcing • Paid Participation • Amazon Mechanical Turk • Define a goal with granular tasks • Recruit the crowd • Pay per response/task • Kaggle, InnoCentive, Netflix Prize • Competition based • Only winner gets paid • Unpaid Participation • Social networks • Web-based game • CMS’ and Wiki to track offline tasks • Utility tracking user behavior
Examples • SCORE++. (Paid) • Finding r.o.i. in microscopy images • Recruit crowd from AMT at a low cost • Individuals manually define r.o.i. Consensus truth regions are found by comparing all responses.
Examples • Phylo. (Unpaid) • Tetris/Bejeweled-like game format • Players match and sort blocks of similar color in short time. • Goal is to get better multiple sequence alignment
The “Zero-Curation” Model • Technical Difficulties / Lessons Learned • iCAPTURer, iCAPTURer 2 • Skewed participation curve, i.e. few individuals do most of the work • Gaps in expertise. ~66% correct responses on given task • Highly biased towards one of the answers, e.g. “yes”. • Benefits • Cost advantage • Humans are amazing gamers • Engaging population in science
References • Good et al. 2006. Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control: A Zero-Curation Model for Ontology Development. Pac SympBiocomput. 2006:128-39. • Good and Wilkinson. 2007. Ontology engineering using volunteer labor. Proceedings of the 16th Intl Conf on World Wide Web. • Snow et al. 2008. Cheap and Fast - But is it Good?: Evaluating Non-Expert Annotations for Natural Language Tasks. Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. • SETI@Homehttp://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ • Folding@Homehttp://folding.stanford.edu/ • Galaxy Zoo http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ • AMT https://www.mturk.com/ • Kagglehttp://www.kaggle.com/ • InnoCentivehttps://www.innocentive.com/ • Netflix Prize http://www.netflixprize.com/ • ITK http://www.itk.org/ • SCORE++ proposal http://www.itk.org/Wiki/images/a/a4/Megason-A2D2proposal-SCORExx.pdf • Phylohttp://phylo.cs.mcgill.ca • iCAPTURer presentation http://www.slideshare.net/goodb/bio-logical-mass-collaboration3