3rd Human Computation Workshop (HCOMP 2011)
co-located with AAAI 2011
August 7 or 8, San Francisco, CA
http://www.humancomputation.com

AAAI workshop announcement:
http://www.aaai.org/Workshops/ws11workshops.php#ws09

AAAI tutorial announcement:
http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/2011/aaai11tutorials.php#sp2

Call For Papers

Human computation is a relatively new research area that studies how
to build intelligent systems that involves human computers, with each
of them performing computation (e.g., image classification,
translation, and protein folding) that leverage human intelligence,
but challenges even the most sophisticated AI algorithms that exist
today. With the immense growth of the Web, human computation systems
can now leverage the abilities of an unprecedented number of Internet
users to perform complex computation. Various genres of human
computation applications are available today, including games with a
purpose (e.g., the ESP Game) that generates useful data through
gameplay, crowdsourcing marketplaces (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk)
that coordinate workers to perform tasks for monetary rewards, and
identity verification systems (e.g. reCAPTCHA) that generate useful
data through users performing computation for access to online
content.

Despite the variety of human computation applications, there exist
many common core research issues. How can we design mechanisms for
querying human computers in such a way that incentivizes or encourages
truthful responses? What are the techniques for aggregating noisy
outputs from multiple human computers? How do we effectively assign
tasks to human computers to match their particular expertise and
interests? What are some programming paradigms for designing
algorithms that effectively leverage the humans in the loop? How do we
build human computation systems that involve the joint efforts of both
machines and humans, trading off each of their particular strengths
and weaknesses? Significant advances on such questions will likely
need to draw many disciplines, including machine learning, mechanism
and market design, information retrieval, decision-theoretic planning,
optimization, human computer interaction, etc.

The workshop recognizes the growing opportunity for AI to function as
an enabling technology in human computation systems. At the same time,
AI can leverage technical advances and data collected from human
computation systems for its own advancement. The goal of HCOMP 2011
is to bring together academic and industry researchers from diverse
subfields in a stimulating discussion of existing human computation
applications and future directions of this relatively new subject
area. The workshop also aims to broaden the scope of human computation
to more than the issue of data collection to a broader definition of
human computation, to study systems where humans perform a major part
of the computation or are an integral part of the overall
computational system.

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Programming languages, tools and platforms to support human computation
* Domain-specific challenges in human computation
* Methods for estimating the cost, reliability, and skill of labelers
* Methods for designing and controlling workflows for human computation tasks
* Empirical and formal models of incentives in human computation systems
* Benefits of one-time versus repeated labeling
* Design of manipulation-resistance mechanisms in human computation
* Concerns regarding the protection of labeler identities
* Active learning from imperfect human labelers
* Techniques for inferring expertise and routing tasks
* Theoretical limitations of human computation

Format

The workshop will consist of several invited talks from prominent
researchers in different areas related to human computation, selected
presentations of technical and position papers, as well as poster and
demo sessions, organized by theme.

Submission

Technical papers and position papers may be up to 6 pages in length,
and should follow AAAI formatting guidelines. For demos and poster
presentations, authors should submit a short paper or extended
abstract (up to 2 pages). We welcome early work, and particularly
encourage submission of visionary position papers that are more
forward looking. Papers must be submitted electronically via CMT --
please visit the supplemental workshop site for further instructions.
The submission deadline is April 22, 2010.

Workshop Website

For more details, please consult our workshop website at
http://www.humancomputation.com/.

Organizers

Luis von Ahn (co-chair)
Carnegie Mellon University
biglou@cs.cmu.edu

Panagiotis Ipeirotis (co-chair)
New York University
panos@stern.nyu.edu

Edith Law
Carnegie Mellon University
edith@cmu.edu

Haoqi Zhang
Harvard University
hq@eecs.harvard.edu

Jing Wang
New York University
jwang5@stern.nyu.edu

Program Committee

Foster Provost
Winter Mason
Eric Horvitz
Ed Chi
Serge Belongie
Paul Bennett
Yiling Chen
Kristen Grauman
Raman Chandrasekar
Rob Miller
Deepak Ganesan
Chris Callison-Burch
Vitor R. Carvalho
David Parkes
Markus Krause
Jennifer Wortman Vaughan