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Handbook of human computation
Michelucci P., Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated, New York, NY, 2013. 1000 pp. Type: Book (978-1-461488-05-7)
Date Reviewed: Sep 17 2014

The editor-in-chief, Pietro Michelucci, and nine other section editors have compiled research surveys (and written several of them) on human computation (HC), arguably definable as computers outsourcing to humans.

There are 80 chapters grouped into nine sections: “Foundations,” “Application Domains,” “Techniques and Modalities,” “Infrastructure and Architecture,” “Algorithms,” “Participation,” “Analysis,” “Policy and Security,” and “Impact.” The 114 unique contributors (some on several papers) offer more than 2,400 non-unique references. Numbers count, but how can one grasp the enormity of this book? (More about that word choice shortly.)

I asked two dozen computer-savvy, computer science, and information technology people: “What is human computation?” The best answer was that it concerned the Turing test. Most had no clue. Maybe this is an argument for a five-pound HC handbook with 1,100-plus pages, but unless there is a ganglion cyst in the house, I’m not sure they would be impressed by it. Perhaps later they saw the “People of ACM” bulletin in a May 15, 2014 email:

Luis von Ahn is the A. Nico Habermann Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is working to develop a new area of computer science that he calls human computation, which aims to build systems that combine the intelligence of humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone.

On his website, http://cs.cmu.edu/~biglou, von Ahn continues the last sentence: “I call this human computation, but others sometimes call it crowdsourcing.” (The editor also insists on the agora: no crowd, no HC.)

My correspondents might now think that von Ahn is the father of HC. Why then does he have no entry in the index of this book? Well, not many humans do. Turing, Genghis Khan, Obama, and Berners-Lee rate one reference each, plus duplicates under Khan and Tim. Darwin has two.

Here are some other omissions: Wolfgang von Kempelen invented the Turk, Johann Mälzel bought and showed it; Art Quaife, a lion keeper, planned to outsource his life to cryogenics in order to let an automated theorem prover (ATP) bring the Goldbach bacon home to him in due time; Larry Wos, the blind computer genius at Argonne, set Otter and other ATPs in teams with humans (for example, Steve Winker, Bill McCune, and Branden Fitelson) to guide them to prove real theorems; Jim Gray’s disappearance at sea introduced many of us to Amazon Mechanical Turk (followed by Steve Fossett); Karl Sims founded genetic art and others; the Wizard of Oz; all 114 contributors; and more. Charles Babbage, whose universal Analytical Engine would have outsourced its subroutine loading, has four references, as B. Charles.

Those who lack index entries may not be ignored in the text, but it makes it hard to prove. Back to von Ahn. His HC creations enjoy numerous indexical citations: GWAP (as “games with a purpose”), 33; ESP, 18; reCAPTCHA, six; Duolingo, three. Even CAPTCHA gets one. Thirty percent of the chapters list a reference by von Ahn, some as many as four. So he is redeemed as a beacon shining through this colossal book. Disclosure (if not disclaimer): von Ahn’s mentor and collaborator Manuel Blum was a “signer” on my dissertation.

On to content. The chapters are not numbered, so the initial page is given as (111). The nearly three-century history of HC is covered (13, 89), with frequent reflections on roots in other chapters. Many contributors seek common vocabularies and taxonomies, starting with Michelucci (83), plus Caverlee (837) for exploits.

Technical aspects are covered by detailed chapters in Parts 3 to 5, especially those by Billinghurst (317), Lyon and Pacuit (599), and Crouser, Ottley, and Chang (615). Many papers discuss implemented systems, including von Ahn’s (393, 131, 561).

Because it is tempting to see HC as a triumph of human with machine [certainly not over, in view of recent announcements (disputed) that a chatbot passed the Turing test], close attention should be paid to chapters that discuss the possible downsides of HC, including security risks (879), privacy (857), exploitation (837), psychopathology (51), and conflict (993).

The most entertaining chapters, by Pavlic and Pratt (911) and Moses et al. (25), compare HC with eusocial insects being social. But no Physarum. Big data (an underlying theme), cupcakes, and dopamine meet privacy in Deutsch’s chapter (847).

Overall, there is something very rugged, even intimidating about this monstrous work, but “enormity” is globally inappropriate. So hang that term only on the last topics to mention: wicked problems (265) and malevolently hard artificial intelligence (545). Essential unsolvability has great personal appeal.

The authors and editors have put together a coherent, cogent, readable collection of incredibly broad scope. There are myriad minor lapses, such as von Ahn’s name misspelled (200), one page after the name of the author of American psycho is botched twice near a revealing photo of his book cover. Speed to press may account for these, but here is a closing theory: the demiurge of HC wants to make herself known to a wide readership of computer cognoscenti, so she arranges the crowdsourcing of a vast book. She may or may not have self-referentially included a review.

Interested readers should also consult a couple of additional sources [1,2].

Reviewer:  Benjamin Wells Review #: CR142724 (1412-1017)
1) Law, E.; von Ahn, L. Human computation. Synthesis Lectures on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: Synthesis Lectures on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Morgan & Claypool, San Rafael, CA, 2011.
2) Grier, D. A. Crowdsourcing for dummies. Wiley, Chichester, UK, 2013.
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