Crowd research: Open and scalable university laboratories

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articleResearchpeer-review

  • Rajan Vaish
  • Snehalkumar S. Gaikwad
  • Geza Kovacs
  • Andreas Veit
  • Ranjay Krishna
  • Imanol Arrieta Ibarra
  • Camelia Simoiu
  • Michael Wilber
  • Belongie, Serge
  • Sharad Goel
  • James Davis
  • Michael S. Bernstein

Research experiences today are limited to a privileged few at select universities. Providing open access to research experiences would enable global upward mobility and increased diversity in the scientific workforce. How can we coordinate a crowd of diverse volunteers on open-ended research? How could a PI have enough visibility into each person's contributions to recommend them for further study? We present Crowd Research, a crowdsourcing technique that coordinates open-ended research through an iterative cycle of open contribution, synchronous collaboration, and peer assessment. To aid upward mobility Andrecognize contributions in publications, we introduce a decentralized credit system: participants allocate credits to each other, which a graph centrality algorithm translates into a collectively-created author order. Over 1, 500 people from 62 countries have participated, 74% from institutions with low access to research. Over two years and three projects, this crowd has produced articles at top-tier Computer Science venues, and participants have gone on to leading graduate programs.

Original languageEnglish
JournalUIST 2017 - Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
Pages (from-to)829-843
Number of pages15
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 20 Oct 2017
Externally publishedYes
Event30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, UIST 2017 - Quebec City, Canada
Duration: 22 Oct 201725 Oct 2017

Conference

Conference30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, UIST 2017
CountryCanada
CityQuebec City
Period22/10/201725/10/2017
SponsorACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (ACM SIGGRAPH), ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI), Autodesk Inc, Disney Research, et al, Jeff Han

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

    Research areas

  • Citizen science, Crowd research, Crowdsourcing

ID: 301827247