Crowd-powered interfaces

Abstract

We investigate crowd-powered interfaces: interfaces that embed human activity to support high-level conceptual activities such as writing, editing and question-answering. For example, a crowd-ppowered interface using paid crowd workers can compute a series of textual cuts and edits to a paragraph, then provide the user with an interface to condense his or her writing. We map out the design space of interfaces that depend on outsourced, friendsourced, and data mined resources, and report on designs for each of these. We discuss technical and motivational challenges inherent in human-powered interfaces.