TIME can really drag when you're waiting for a bus or train. Soon you might be able to use that dead time to contribute to a crowdsourced project.
The idea grew out of a need to tackle one of the problems with crowdsourcing, says Vassilis Kostakos at the University of Oulu in Finland, which is the potential for bias in the results. People can game the system with fraudulent product reviews, for example, and the fact that users are often relatively poor people from the US and India can skew the findings of a research project.
Kostakos and colleagues wondered if interactive screens offered a viable alternative. "Our studies suggested that people walk up to public displays not knowing exactly what they want to do and usually to kill time. So we tried to find a way to tap into that," he says.
They set up four large LCD touchscreens in busy walkways. A "touch me" button invited passers-by to help with a public health task – identifying malaria-infected blood cells to train detection software – while cameras recorded how people behaved when using the screens.
They got 1200 answers over 25 days and found the accuracy of the results was comparable to those of paid workers on Mechanical Turk. Lone users were the most active, perhaps because they were free from peer pressure or distraction. These loners also created a honeypot effect, attracting more users, the researchers will tell the UbiComp conference in Zurich, Switzerland, in September.
Vassilis says such displays could be used to tap local knowledge, such as the best place to walk a dog, the meaning of some confusing signage, or what bands are playing in town.
Games are possible too. The team has just deployed one called Game of Words, in which people describe their surroundings in one word and then other users vote it up or down. "This builds a dictionary of keywords used to describe a location," says Kostakos. These could be used to select relevant content for the screens.
"The fact that they show good results from altruistic crowdsourcing is exciting for everyone in this field," says Samuel Johnston of crowdsourcing firm OpenSignal in London.
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