The introduction of Web 2.0 paves the way for the emergence of the novel social computing paradigm, where computing based on human interactions plays a central and important role in harnessing the information and knowledge from the crowd. More specifically, human computation has become a potent tool in solving complex problems that are still post good challenges to today's computers through the use of interactive games or as outsourced tasks. In this presentation, I will provide an introduction to the social computing framework and some of its related topics. I will then focus on human computation systems. With the innovative human computing paradigm, various interesting applications will be presented to demonstrate how it can leverage the collective crowd intelligence to tackle difficult computational problems.

Irwin King's research interests include machine learning, web intelligence & social computing, data mining, and multimedia processing, including image, video, and text. More specifically, he is interested in applying learning techniques in social computing, e.g., large graph algorithms, ranking problems, Q&A systems, etc. One notable system he has developed is the VeriGuide System, which detects similar sentences and performs readability analysis of text-based documents in both English and in Chinese.

• [2008, article]

  Luis von Ahn and Laura Dabbish, "Designing games with a purpose," Commun. ACM, vol. 51, iss. 8, pp. 58-67, 2008.

• [2009, inproceedings]

  Man-Ching Yuen, Ling-Jyh Chen, and Irwin King, "A Survey of Human Computation Systems," in Proc. CSE (4), 2009, pp. 723-728.

• Wikipedia's Human-based Computation