Department of Computer Science and Automation Ph.D. Thesis Defense Speaker : Mr. Swaprava Nath Title : Mechanism Design for Strategic Crowdsourcing Faculty Advisor : Prof. Y. Narahari Date : Tuesday, December 17, 2013 Time : 11:30 AM Venue : CSA Multimedia Class (Room No. 252, First Floor) Abstract This thesis looks into the economics of crowdsourcing using game theoretic modeling. The art of aggregating information and expertise from a diverse population has been in practice since a long time. The Internet and the revolution in communication and computational technologies has made this task easier and given birth to a new era of online resource aggregation, which is now popularly referred to as crowdsourcing. Two important features of crowdsourcing are: (a) crowdsourcing is always human driven, hence the participants are rational and intelligent and they experience a payoff in some form through their participation, and (b) the participants are connected over a social network. To understand the behavior and the outcome of such a strategic crowd, we need to understand the economics of a crowdsourcing network. In the thesis, we have considered the following three major facets of the crowdsourcing problem. (i) Elicitation of the true qualities of the crowd workers: as the crowd is often unstructured and unknown to the designer, it is important to determine if the crowdsourced job is indeed performed at the highest quality. (ii) Resource critical task execution: due to the diverse geographical, cultural, socio-economic reasons, crowdsourcing entails certain manipulations that are unusual in the classical theory. The design has to be robust enough to handle fake identities or information provided by the crowd. (iii) Improving the productivity of the crowdsourcing network: as the designer's goal is to maximize some measurable output of the crowdsourcing system, an interesting question is how one can design the network and/or the incentive scheme so that the system performs at the optimal level considering the strategic nature of the individuals. In the thesis, we provide novel solutions to all the questions above using game theoretic modeling and mechanism design innovations. Our investigation helps in understanding certain limits of achievability, and provides design protocols in order to make crowdsourcing more efficient. ALL ARE WELCOME _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l

Department of Computer Science and Automation Ph.D. Thesis Defense Speaker : Mr. Swaprava Nath Title : Mechanism Design for Strategic Crowdsourcing Faculty Advisor : Prof. Y. Narahari Date : Tuesday, December 17, 2013 Time : 11:30 AM Venue : CSA Multimedia Class (Room No. 252, First Floor) Abstract This thesis looks into the economics of crowdsourcing using game theoretic modeling. The art of aggregating information and expertise from a diverse population has been in practice since a long time. The Internet and the revolution in communication and computational technologies has made this task easier and given birth to a new era of online resource aggregation, which is now popularly referred to as crowdsourcing. Two important features of crowdsourcing are: (a) crowdsourcing is always human driven, hence the participants are rational and intelligent and they experience a payoff in some form through their participation, and (b) the participants are connected over a social network. To understand the behavior and the outcome of such a strategic crowd, we need to understand the economics of a crowdsourcing network. In the thesis, we have considered the following three major facets of the crowdsourcing problem. (i) Elicitation of the true qualities of the crowd workers: as the crowd is often unstructured and unknown to the designer, it is important to determine if the crowdsourced job is indeed performed at the highest quality. (ii) Resource critical task execution: due to the diverse geographical, cultural, socio-economic reasons, crowdsourcing entails certain manipulations that are unusual in the classical theory. The design has to be robust enough to handle fake identities or information provided by the crowd. (iii) Improving the productivity of the crowdsourcing network: as the designer's goal is to maximize some measurable output of the crowdsourcing system, an interesting question is how one can design the network and/or the incentive scheme so that the system performs at the optimal level considering the strategic nature of the individuals. In the thesis, we provide novel solutions to all the questions above using game theoretic modeling and mechanism design innovations. Our investigation helps in understanding certain limits of achievability, and provides design protocols in order to make crowdsourcing more efficient. ALL ARE WELCOME _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l