Humans Plus Computers Equals Better Crowdsourcing

If computer scientist Panagiotis Ipeirotis were to write a profile of himself, he’d start by hiring people online to summarize the key concepts in his published papers. Then he’d write a program to download every word in his 187 blog entries and examine which posts visitors to the site read most. Ipeirotis, an associate professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, would do all that because his research shows that pairing computer and human intelligence can unearth discoveries neither can find alone. Ipeirotis, 35, is an expert on crowdsourcing, a way to break down big projects into small tasks that many people perform online. He tries to find ways, as he puts it, of using computer databases to augment human inputs.

Ipeirotis describes a recent real-world success with Magnum Photos. The renowned photo agency had hundreds of thousands of images scanned into its digital archive that it couldn’t search because they weren’t tagged with keywords. So Magnum hired Tagasauris, a startup Ipeirotis co-founded, to begin annotating. As Tagasauris’s online workers typed in tags, its analytical software queried databases to make the descriptions more specific. For example, when workers tagged a photo with the word “chicken,” the software tried to clarify whether the worker meant the feathery animal, the raw meat, or the death-defying game.