December 5, 2012 (EPFL, Lausanne): Presentation of our Paper: "CrowdLang: A Programming Language for the Systematic Exploration of Human Computation Systems " at the Conference on Social Informatics 2012Paper
June 25, 2012 (Chicago, IL): Presentation of our Paper: "How to translate a book within an hour - Towards Programmable Human Computers" at the ACM Web Science Conference 2012Paper
June 7, 2012: Presentation of our pricing and allocation framework CrowdManager at the Workshop on Social Computing and User Generated Content in ValenciaPaper
December 26, 2011: Our project "CrowdLang" highlighted in UZH MagazineArticle
I am a Ph.D. student at the DDIS group at the Institute of Informatics. I joined in September 2010 as a Fast-Track Master Student in Computer Science. Before that I studied Information Systems and Computer Science (Bachelor of Science) at the University of Zurich and worked for Schneider Software AG as Software Engineer and worked during a summer internship for the Swiss National Bank (SAP SRM customizing and business process analysis).
Much of the prosperity gained by the industrialization of the economy in the 18th century arose from the increased productivity by dividing work into smaller tasks performed by more specialized workers. Wikipedia, Google and other stunning success stories show that with the rapid growth of the World Wide Web, this concept of “Division of Labour” can also be applied on knowledge work. Consequently, systems interweaving both the number-crunching capabilities and scalability of computer systems with the creativity and high-level cognitive capabilities of people--- almost like a global brain ---are now routinely able to solve problems that would have been unthinkably difficult only a few years ago. I believe, to harness the full potential of the global brain, we need new powerful programming metaphors that support the design of human computation systems, as well as general-purpose infrastructure to execute them. Specifically, to move from a culture of “wizard of oz”- techniques, in which applications are the result of extensive trial-and-error refinements, I'm working on our programming framework CrowdLang. Therefore, we consider research in Computer Science, Coordination Science, Social Sciences, Mechanism Design, and Game Theory.
In current research, we investigate the use of CrowdLang and crowd computing in a translation task. More details about that in the following video: Programming the Global Brain - The CrowdLang Approach