Citizen Sensor Network

Citizen Sensor Network

Human Computation

One of the recent trends in computing has been to utilize human cognitive abilities over the Web to solve hard AI problems. These are problems that are not straightforward to solve with currently known computer algorithms. For example image identification and natural language processing are tasks that humans champion but the prevailing computer algorithms are childish at best. Such problems, if dispersed within a group of humans, can be solved far more quickly and accurately. Systems such as the Amazon Mechanical Turk already exploit the power of humans over the Web where a hard computation task (such as identifying entities from a satellite image) is distributed among human participants for a fee. This trend of using humans as computing devices is known as human computation.