One of the foremost challenges for information technology over the last few years has been to explore, understand, and extract useful information from large amounts of data. Some particular tasks such as annotating data or matching entities have been outsourced to human workers for many years. But the last few years have seen the rise of a new research field called crowdsourcing that aims at de...

The availability of rich data from sources such as the World Wide Web, social media, and sensor streams is giving rise to a range of applications that rely on a clean, consistent, and integrated database built over these sources. Human input, or crowd-sourcing, is an effective tool to help produce such high-quality data. It is infeasible, however, to involve humans at every step of the data cle...

Success of Wikipedia has opened a number of possibilities for crowd sourcing learning resources. However, not all crowd sourcing initiatives are successful. For developing countries, adoption factors like lack of infrastructure and poor teacher training can have an impact on success of such systems. This paper presents an exploratory study to determine if teachers in a developing country are ab...

The Internet has allowed collaboration on an unprecedented scale. Wikipedia, Luis Von Ahn’s ESP game, and reCAPTCHA have proven that tasks typically performed by expensive in-house or outsourced teams can instead be delegated to the mass of Internet computer users. These success stories show the opportunity for crowd-sourcing other tasks, such as allowing computer users to help each other answe...

In recent years, crowd sourcing has emerged as a good solution for digitizing voluminous tasks. What’s more, it offers a social solution promising to extend economic opportunities to low-income countries, alleviating the welfare of poor, honest and yet uneducated labor. On the other hand, crowd sourcing’s virtual nature and anonymity encourages fraudulent workers to misuse the service for quick...