CCC to hold a workshop on Human Computation

By Ann Drobnis, CCC

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will hold a Human Computation Roadmap Summit to explore the past and prospective impact of human computation (HC) and to identify the research areas and activities that will directly lead to the most beneficial societal outcomes. The goal of the workshop is to produce a national research roadmap for HC that will be briefed to the Hill toward new research funding and a national HC initiative.

Today we are witnessing a rapid integration of humans into information-processing systems. Some of this is emergent (e.g., social networks) and some deliberate (e.g., crowdsourcing). A research area has coalesced around understanding and engineering such systems toward novel capabilities. Indeed, these HC systems are embedded in society today, predicting epidemics, supporting crisis relief, improving patient outcomes, producing scientific data, enabling collective governance, augmenting collaboration, and archiving history.

Despite these claims, the vast transformative potential of HC has only begun to be tapped. Only by considering deeply the space of research possibilities and potential applications of HC from a variety of multidisciplinary perspectives can we hope to crystalize a vision that can guide us conscientiously and deliberately toward a maximally effective research agenda.

The workshop organizing committee includes Pietro Michelucci, Editor-in-Chief, Handbook of Human Computation;Janis Dickinson, Director of Citizen Science, Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Haym Hirsh, Dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science, Cornell University; Lea Shanley, Director of Commons Lab, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; Randall Bryant, Dean, Carnegie Mellon University & CCC Liaison; and Ann Drobnis, CCC Director.

The workshop will be held June 18-20 in Washington, DC. Additional information about the workshop can be found on the website. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Ann Drobnis at adrobnis@cra.org.