A survey of crowdsourcing systems

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is evolving as a distributed problemsolving and business production model in recent years. In crowdsourcing paradigm, tasks are distributed to networked people to complete such that a company's production cost can be greatly reduced. In 2003, Luis von Ahn and his colleagues pioneered the concept of "human computation", which utilizes human abilities to perform computation tasks that are difficult for computers to process. Later, the term "crowdsourcing" was coined by Jeff Howe in 2006. Since then, a lot of work in crowdsourcing has focused on different aspects of crowdsourcing, such as computational techniques and performance analysis. In this paper, we give a survey on the literature on crowdsourcing which are categorized according to their applications, algorithms, performances and datasets. This paper provides a structured view of the research on crowdsourcing to date. © 2011 IEEE.