Crowdsourcing and Collective Intelligence

It is now possible to mobilize a crowd in minutes to address large-scale social problems. But what are kinds of problems are crowds good at solving? That's a key concern of this school of thought, which aims to understand concepts such as the role crowds can play in sustainability, the role of project task complexity in open-source development projects or the sharing of designs for use with 3D printers. Given how quickly technology can allow crowds to address large-scale problems, it is critical to have research in this area that can accelerate economic growth by allowing startups to move from idea to implementation.

Professor Jeffrey Nickerson, director of the center, has presented some of his discoveries in this area at Wikimedia headquarters, in San Francisco.

Selected publications

Kittur, A., Nickerson, J.V., Bernstein, M.S., et al. "The Future of Crowd Work." Proceedings from the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, ACM, New York, 2013.

Yu, L., Nickerson, J.V. and Sakamoto, Y. "Collective Creativity: Where We Are and Where We Might Go." Proceedings of Collective Intelligence, January 2012.

Yu, L. and Nickerson, J.V. "Generating Creative Ideas through Crowds: An Experimental Study of Combination." 32nd International Conference on Information Systems, December 2011.

Kyriakou, H., Englehardt, S. and Nickerson, J.V. "Networks of Innovation in 3D Printing." Workshop on Information in Networks, August 2012.

Nickerson, J.V., Sakamoto, Y. and Yu, L. "Structures for Creativity: The Crowdsourcing of Design." CHI 2011 Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Human Computation: Systems, Studies, and Platforms, May 2011.

Yu, L. and Nickerson, J.V. "Cooks or Cobblers? Crowd Creativity through Combination." Proceedings of the CHI 2011 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM Press, 2011.

Nickerson, J.V., and Monroy-Hernandez, A. "Appropriation and Creativity: User-Initiated Contests in Scratch." Proceedings from Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-44). January 2011.

Sakamoto, Y., Tanaka, Y., Yu, L. and Nickerson, J.V. "The Crowdsourcing Design Space." In Human Computer Interaction International, Springer, 2011.

Nickerson, J.V. and Yu, L. "Crowds and Machines: Systems for Social Creativity." In the Workshop on Semi-Automated Creativity: Software as a Creative Collaborator. ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition, July 2011.

Bao, J., Sakamoto, Y. and Nickerson, J.V. "Evaluating Design Solutions Using Crowds." 17th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), August 2011.

Nickerson, J.V. and Sakamoto, Y. "Crowdsourcing Creativity: Combining Ideas in Networks." Workshop on Information in Networks (WIN), September 2010.

Nickerson, J.V., Zahner, D., Corter, J.E., Tversky, B., Yu, L. and Rho, Y.J. "Matching Mechanisms to Situations through the Wisdom of the Crowd." Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), 2009.