In crowdsourcing, cheating is a common problem, and it’s a two-way street: requesters can manipulate and deceive workers just as workers can con a requester. Everyone involved needs to be creative and cautious to avoid getting taken. For example, many crowdsourcing managers use looping—asking a question multiple times to generate

Now that the frenzy of South By Southwest Interactive has settled down, we wanted to share some of the new types of projects that emerged in the first quarter of 2014. Crowdsourced Image Analysis: Using the crowd for business-to-business competitive intelligence projects based on satellite imagery. Once confined to national

One of the most underappreciated aspects of the rise of crowdsourcing is that it’s laying the groundwork for a fundamental change in the very nature of work. The construct of the M-F, 9am-5pm, on-site, day job is now only marginally workable. Employers find it more difficult to get demonstrable ROI

All businesses struggle with seasonality or variability in their labor requirements, in one way or another. Resort hotels are busy in summer and much slower in winter. Tax preparation firms are swamped during the April crunch. Alaskan seafood operations work around the clock in summer and then stop completely in

Some analyses of crowdsourcing have described it as a form of “social” network. But is crowdsourcing really social? Can paid work be social? Government, nonprofit, and even some commercial firms use volunteers for crowdsourced tasks. Volunteer-based crowdsourcing is inherently more social than the semi-anonymous piecework of commercial crowdsourcing, because the

Information Evolution is proud to sponsor HCOMP 2016, the world’s premier event for unveiling the latest research on crowdsourcing and human computation. The HCOMP conference, run by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, is hosted at the University of Texas School of Information this year and will take

Information Evolution was proud to sponsor the recent AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing. Speakers and presenters from around the world brought deep academic insight into the vast AI training work cloud labor handles for digital economy leaders like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, and WordPress, as well as the

Often, a company has had one of two experiences with crowdsourcing on their own. They have either been frustrated by poor data generated by an unwieldy crowd or they have simply been unable to gather consistent results. When those companies go to an expert in managed crowdsourcing, they typically start