Reactive Crowdsourcing

An essential aspect for building effective crowdsourcing computations is the ability of ``controlling the crowd", i.e. of dynamically adapting the behaviour of the crowdsourcing systems as response to the quantity and quality of completed tasks or to the availability and reliability of performers. Most crowdsourcing systems only provide limited and predefined controls; in contrast, we present an approach to crowdsourcing which provides fine-level, powerful and flexible controls. We model each crowdsourcing application as composition of elementary task types and we progressively transform these high level specifications into the features of a reactive execution environment that supports task planning, assignment and completion as well as performer monitoring and exclusion. Controls are specified as active rules on top of data structures which are % semi-automatically derived from the model of the application; rules can be added, dropped or modified, thus guaranteeing maximal flexibility with limited effort. We also report on our prototype platform that implements the proposed framework and we show the results of our experimentations with different rule sets, demonstrating how simple changes to the rules can substantially affect time, effort and quality involved in crowdsourcing activities.