Technological Applications of Crowdsourcing
Abstract — Crowdsourcing is used in
critical problem solving with the help of
community. Ever since Jeff Howe has
introduced the term crowdsourcing in 2006,
it has evolved a lot in the past decade. Many
of the companies use crowdsourcing to
conduct surveys, get new ideas, assign tasks,
etc. It not only improves the efficiency of
any task but also breaks all the barriers of
the company to involve community in the
project as whole. The internet age gave a
huge boost to the crowdsourcing as more
and more people can have access to these
platforms such as Amazon Mechanical
Turk (AMT). These tasks are completed
based on the collaborative efforts from the
workers which in turn may give whole new
innovative ideas to the company. Tasks such
as sentiment analysis, image tagging,
classifying unsafe videos, websites, etc.
which is difficult for a machine to perform
require human intervention for successfully
completing these tasks.
This paper investigates about
crowdsourcing and its need and how it has
evolved in the last decade. It explains the
benefits of crowdsourcing with its use in
real-time problem solving. It also outlines
the various application of crowdsourcing in
the modern day and explains about the
future advancements using crowdsourcing.
Keywords — Crowdsourcing, Community;
Applications of Crowdsourcing; AMT;
efficiency; internet age; new ideas; task
1. Introduction
Crowdsourcing is a process of outsourcing a
job or task online that can be taken up by any
number of people and can be solved. People
can select the task depending upon their
interest and finish it .This outsourcing helps to
get numerous ideas from people that can be
effectively implemented in no time. The task
in done either in exchange of small payment or
free. Platforms such as Amazon Mechanical
Turk (AMT) [1] provide the service of
outsourcing a task to huge number of people
called Internet users. AMT platform comprises
of a requester that requests a job to be
complete, HIT, worker who completes the
task, assignment that keeps a track on the
progress of the task and in the end reward is
given to the worker that gives the most
effective or practical solution as per required
by the company.
Company uploads the task or job on such
platforms where people can take up any task
and finish it before the deadline. These internet
users are called turkers and the task assigned is
called Human Intelligence Task or HIT. These
HIT’s can be done by a number of people and
the most efficient solution is selected that can
be based on a number of inputs from the
company. Crowdsourcing platforms provide it
with the power to get any task done. Basic
example of crowdsourcing is the Google
Image Labeler that asks the user to identify
images based on some input. Unlike the
traditional way of solving a task where
employees are assigned a task, crowdsourcing
helps to solve it using huge crowd. This is the
power of crowd that make this thing so
powerful that in the last few years big MNC’s
outsource their business model and ask others
help for improvements or suggestions. People
in turn are paid for their contribution.
For example, in the late 1800’s, for the
compilation of Oxford English
Dictionary [2], people were asked to provide a
catalog of words. Thus, crowdsourcing was
being used even before people had any idea
about it. Wikipedia which started in 2003 is
the most common example of crowdsourcing.
People can write any article on any topic while
others can also suggest changes or update in
those articles. These updates and changes are
subjected to verification. YouTube which was
launched in 2005 is a crowd sourced
entertainment platform where videos are
audios are uploaded by a huge crowd. Linux
was one big example where people can edit the
source code to give more functionality to the
operating system and respond to the author in
order to update those specifications. This can
also be compared to open source technology
which has become really popular these days.
These examples clearly tell about the power of
crowd and how revolutionary it can be in the
future.
 2. Evolution of Crowdsourcing
As discussed earlier, we can track the use of
crowdsourcing from 1714 where the British
Government [4] offered prize money for a
simple and practical way to calculate ship’s
longitude which was finally given in 1765 to
John Harrison. Also, King Louis XVI of
France in 1783 presented a prize for creating
alkali from sea salt which Nicholas Leblance
won in 1791. In 1795 France government also
offered prize money for simple and practical
way to preserve large quantity of food. It was
Nicolas Appert award winning paper
published in 1810. Similarly in 1884 the
publishers of Oxford English Dictionary
published an open call for ordinary words to
be compiled into a dictionary. So we can trace
a number of instances from the past where we
can see that crowdsourcing was used to solve a
given task.
Soon after Jeff Howe introduced the word
crowdsourcing in 2006 the process of getting
task done collaboratively gained a lot of
momentum. Since then instead of getting the
work done collaboratively offline has shifted
to online based platform .These online
platforms such as AMT, TopCoder, UpWork,
etc. provide with the functionality of
publishing a task online that can be viewed by
everyone and people can opt for the task
according to their interest. From offline and
hardcoded work, crowdsourcing is now
processed online and digitally. From finding
its use in image tagging to R&D, Open signal
to Software development, Biomedicine to
Collective Intelligence, Mobile to Big data,
etc. crowdsourcing is lately covering all the
possible domains.
3. Benefits of Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is a collaborative process of
giving a problem its most efficient and
appropriate solution based on the human
efforts. Crowdsourcing not only reduce the
work load but also is time efficient in solving a
problem. Many platforms such as AMT,
TopCoder, Crowd4U, gMission, etc. provide
the mechanism required to solve any kind of
task give to us. They support coding, survey,
image labelling, etc. kind of tasks where each
and every task requires different kind of
mechanism and functionality. Crowdsourcing
also affects the quality of the work that is
being done as more and more number of
people provides various ideas and suggestions.
The success of the crowdsourcing works is
indeed dependent upon the quality of work
obtained from it. Other factors such as in-
depth knowledge of the field and their past
work experience in such domains. Few of the
benefits [3] of crowdsourcing are:-
Diversity- Crowdsourcing platforms helps us
to reach to a large number of experts from all
over the world thus bringing more expert
opinions on the task and making our system
more fault tolerant.
Reduced time – Crowdsourcing helps to
complete a particular task in less time as
compared to a traditional worker that will take
some time to complete it. This is because huge
a number of people are working on that task
on crowdsourcing platforms thus giving an
edge over traditional workers. These workers
try to finish these tasks before time and
efficiently in order to earn the reward.
Reduced cost- The overall cost of the process
is also reduced as there is a competition
between a huge number of people that try to
compete with each other and submit a better
work as compared to another. Since only one
person has to be rewarded, it reduces the
overall cost.
Increased productivity- Crowdsourcing
platforms are online based so huge number of
experts can view the task and select the task
based on their interest. People from different
domain can provide their expertise on these
tasks which helps to reduce the cost and time
which in turn increases the productivity.
Expert solution- Experts from different
domains can view the task and provide their
expertise on such tasks. Thus a single task may
4. Applications of Crowdsourcing
Mobile Crowdsourcing- Today we can get the
latest smartphones with many built in features,
sensors, etc. that can predict and perform
various calculation. Smartphones are now built
in with Wi-Fi technology, cellular data, app
store, etc. that help us to perform various
operations. Thus mobile crowdsourcing
applications can be divided into two
categories: human sensor and human
intelligence.
Human intelligence or knowledge of human
which can easily perform the task that cannot
be performed by a machine such as sentiment
analysis, natural language processing, etc .
Humans are the main worker of the task while
mobile acts as a secondary worker. Human
sensor is the process in which humans act as
sensors. In addition to the information sensed
from mobile sensors, human observation data
such as smart transportation as well as health
records are collected and analysed. Thus
mobile crowdsourcing helps in traffic
information, for blind people VizViz
application serves as a tool to interact with the
outside world, GPS, etc.
Software Development- Since 2006 many
companies have started using the power of
crowdsourcing in software development.
DELL was the first company to use
crowdsourcing for DELL innovation
Challenge that invites innovative ideas from
people. Many MNC’s such as Google,
Microsoft, Facebook, etc. seek the help of
crowd for development of various software
applications. They also try to embrace
crowdsourcing in the generic Software
Development Life Cycle (SDLC) practice:
analysis, design, implementation, testing and
maintenance [6].
involve a huge number to experts to
collectively give an expert solution to the task.
Innovative Ideas- Crowdsourcing helps to get
ideas from a large number of people. Thinking
of each and every individual differs from each
other. Everyone visualises things in various
perspectives depending upon their creativity.
Platforms such as TopCoder, vworker, eLance,
etc. help in crowdsourcing the development of
software applications and invite various
functionality suggestions from everyone. It
has got many advantages over traditional
software development such as less
development time, Innovative idea, Quality
enhancement, reduced development cost, etc.
Apple’s AppStori is a similar collaborative
platform that helps in the development of
various mobile applications. But it also
possess some disadvantages. Since there is no
coordinator to check the development design,
a user may follow any design according to his
choice that may not be compatible to
company’s requirement. Also it has
disadvantage in regard of testing and code
integration.
Cloud Web Services- The Cisco "Global
Mobile Data Traffic Forecast" report of 2016
show a 43% hike in the smartphone usage in
2014. It also predicts a 53% annual growth
from the year 2015 to 2020. Thus smartphone
users are increasing rapidly and with this
growth more and more application fetch this
user data which is being pushed into the cloud.
Thus a good functionality on the data base in
required so that applications can send and
receive data over a secured network. Big
companies such as IBM, Google, Verizon,
AT&T, etc. offer cloud computing facilities.
Microsoft’s Azure that provides Cloud
Infrastructure service [9] is leading the market
due to its completeness and ability to execute
in market. Beside the success of social media
networks such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. there
are many other applications like AirBnb that
provides accommodation, Zomato for food
delivery, makemytrip for flight booking, etc.
All these applications make use of cloud
infrastructure to publish data on their
applications that can be accessed by everyone.
Open Signal- Open signal is an application
designed to track cellular signals. A user who
is facing difficulty to connect to cellular
network or is in low signal area can use this
web and mobile application to reach a
coverage area. Huge number of people around
the globe shares their cellular signal
information and based on the data collected
from a huge crowd, it shows the nearby areas
that have good strength of cellular signal
depending on the operator they are using.
Thus, it shows the areas where the users can
move to get good signal strength. This helps
them to track the path to reach the coverage
area.
Biomedicine-Biomedicine (i.e. medical
biology) is a branch of medical science that
applies biological and physiological principles
to clinical practice. The branch especially
applies to biology and
physiology. Biomedicine also can relate to
many other categories in health and biological
related fields. Its process includes Mining
crowd data [11] i.e. research activities of
collecting and analysing the data, produced by
people through participation in public forums,
for the knowledge discovery process; Web
search logs where consumers are increasingly
resorting to resources such as web search
engines and public forums to seek health
information or discuss health concerns such as
adverse drug events; Smartphone applications
and social media where people are
increasingly using smartphone applications to
track personal health and behaviours; Active
crowdsourcing that invites people to
participate in solving a problem in
biomedicine & Labour markets or platforms
that provide the technical environment to
design and submit the crowdsourcing
microtasks.
5. First generation crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing concept was firstly
introduced in 2006 and within no time IT
companies started to engage people with
the aim of completing tasks, generating
desired outputs, etc. which helped these IT
companies reduce the cost to company for
going the traditional way. Since then
various online platforms have been
developed for this purpose. Be it micro-
tasking on social media, Wikipedia, blog,
etc. From web development to software
development, crowdsourcing helps to
serve these companies better rather than
engaging a permanent team of coders.
Biomedicine has also got boosted in R&D
with the introduction of crowdsourcing.
Crowd is now able to share their research
work and articles online for study purpose
of others while other people can also
suggest few development areas. It has
encompassed all the difficulties of
traditional way of work and domains of
Artificial Intelligence, Cloud, Mobile
Computing, Open Signal, etc. all are
developed using crowdsourcing. However,
with the on-going IT advancement, in context
with the continuous flow of IT advancements
throughout the world, we can observe new
hardware and software configurations and
people as IT-oriented crowd [5].
6. Next generation crowdsourcing
Crowdsensing, Situated Crowdsourcing,
Spatial Crowdsourcing, and Wearable
Crowdsourcing are the recent advancement in
the software and hardware configurations.
Crowdsensing- Crowdsensing means
leveraging the built in sensors to detect
location, temperature, speed and other
environmental as a result of human mobility
and Wi-Fi and mobile network. Crowdsensing
collects the data autonomously over a period
of time with the help of mobile sensor
hardware and supply this data to the 1.
crowdsourcing application.
2.
Situated Crowdsensing- Situated
crowdsourcing helps to break down a big task 3.
into smaller tasks that can be completed easily.
But this crowdsourcing has focused on getting
inputs from human engaged at geo-fenced 4.
terminal. For example Bazaar study that shows
that workers in a crowdsourcing market
respond to price change just like in any other
market. 5.
Spatial Crowdsensing- Spatial Crowdsourcing
uses several means such as Mobile apps &
Web platforms, Smartphones, and Wi-Fi and 6.
Mobile networks [10] to animate humans to
perform certain movements in the
environment. Spatial Crowdsourcing can be 7.
found in a variety of situations such as
Emergency response.
Wearable Crowdsourcing- Wearable
crowdsourcing takes leverage of the in-built 8.
sensors in the clothes and apparels that
transmits the data detected on the movement
made by the human being. Various
configurations of robots movements are
9.
calibrated using this data. The movement
differ from individual to individual that better
helps to collectively calibrate the movement.
7. Conclusion
People can work collaboratively to help
achieve a target. Many companies look for
these internet users who are willing to work
with them and help them quantify solution for
a given problem in no time. Major technical
applications of crowdsourcing are mentioned
in this paper with the benefits of
crowdsourcing. Collaborative development for
a problem helps to reduce its time and
improves quality and efficiency of the solution
thereby increasing productivity.
Crowdsourcing has also considerably helped a
lot of people to work on different domains and
learn about new technologies. Crowdsourcing
platforms are a boon for people all around the
global. It helps them to connect together and to
form an alliance as an affective taskforce.
8. REFERENCES
[1] Amazon Mechanical
Turk. http://www.mturk.com/.
[2] A. Lynch. Crowdsourcing Is Not New -
The History of Crowdsourcing, 2010.
[3] Dr.T. Chithralekha, “Application of
Crowdsourcing in Software
Development”, 2016
[4] Buddhadeb Halder “EVOLUTION OF
CROWDSOURCING: Potential Data
Protection, Privacy and Security Concerns
under the New Media Age”, 2014
[5] John Prpić “ Next Generation
Crowdsourcing for Collective Intelligence”,
2016
[6] Suganthy. A, ““Application of
Crowdsourcing in Software Development”,
2016
[7] Wenjun WU, Wei-Tek TSAI, Wei LI, An
evaluation framework for software
crowdsourcing, Front. Comput. Sci., 2013,
7(5): 694-709
[8] Cisco Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast
Update , 20152020,
http://www.eiseo.eornle/enlus/solutions/eollate
ral/serviee-provider/ , 2016
[9] Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Public
Cloud Storage Services, Worldwide
hups://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=l-
2IG5E81&ct= 150626&st=sb, 2016
10. [10] Yongjian Zhao and Qi Han ,“Spatial
Crowdsourcing: Current State and Future
Directions”, 2016
11. [11] Ritu Khare, Benjamin M. Good, Robert
Leaman, Andrew I. Su and Zhiyong Lu,
“Crowdsourcing in biomedicine: challenges
and opportunities”, 2015