The Future of Crowdsourcing and the Sharing Economy – Part II

  • Jeffrey Bigham, Haoqi Zhang, and Eric Horvitz | Carnegie Mellon University, Northwestern University - Evanston, MSR

From Airbnb, to Kickstarter, to Mechanical Turk, the on-demand provisioning of workforce, services, and goods is changing the nature of work and play. In this session, we focus on exploring the challenges and opportunities with these platforms that span from the technological to the social. We will also discuss the future of crowd-based work. The session will feature a wide range of speakers involved in crowdsourcing research as well as lively discussion panels.

Speaker Details

Jeffrey P. Bigham is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He uses clever combinations of on-demand crowds and computation to build and deploy truly intelligent interactive systems, often with a focus on systems supporting people with disabilities

Haoqi Zhang is an assistant professor at Northwestern University in EECS and the Segal Design Institute. His research spans the fields of social computing, crowdsourcing, human computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and decision science. His current work focuses on engaging crowds and communities in problem solving efforts, and on advancing new data-driven design processes. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and B.A. in Computer Science and Economics from Harvard University.

Eric Horvitz is Managing Director at Microsoft Research, Redmond. He has pursued research on machine learning and statistics, decision analysis, and machine intelligence. His research spans theory and practice, and has led to the fielding of applications and services in healthcare, information retrieval, human-computer interaction, and e-commerce. He has pursued studies in human computation, focusing on task routing and problem solving that leverages the complementary skills of human and machine intellect. Eric received his PhD and MD degrees at Stanford University. He has been elected Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He has served as president of AAAI, chair of the AAAS Section on Information, Computing, and Communication, on DARPA ISAT, CCC, and the NSF CISE advisory board.

Series: Microsoft Research Faculty Summit