CrowdPrecision

With the fast evolution of information and communications technology, the Internet has become available almost anywhere and at any time. Smartphones and similar devices have become increasingly essential in everyday life and various kinds have been made readily available in large numbers. The ease of access to such devices has had an immense impact on the number of people around the globe who are interconnected. These global connections enable people to communicate and collaborate across borders instantaneously and at a low cost. That would have been challenging or even impossible a few years ago. Besides enabling easy and fast transfer of information, the Internet has also generated an incredibly huge potential labor force that is available 24/7, globally distributed, and has a highly diverse set of skills.

One approach to access this labor force consisting of global Internet users is Crowdsourcing. Instead of delegating large tasks to dedicated employees, the work is broken down into smaller jobs that can be accomplished independently and are distributed via marketplaces to a large number of online workers. On the one hand, the parallelization leads to a much faster achievement of the tasks. On the other hand, the approach helps to reduce the overall labor costs due to the inclusion of global workers of different salary expectations. Additionally, it further facilitates the flexible scaling of human crowd resources based on current demands, similar to technical cloud infrastructures.

Besides economic aspects, Crowdsourcing also offers a great opportunity for individuals from developing countries, as it introduces channels for safe and well-paid online labor. With its new possibilities for increasing productivity and redefining ways by which businesses carry out projects, Crowdsourcing is already successfully applied in various fields of traditional work, including text production, logo design, programming, and even research and development tasks. Furthermore, it also makes possible the cost-efficient and timely completion of vast numbers of so-called microtasks, which non-expert crowdworkers can complete within a few minutes and without any prior knowledge but which are impossible to perform using algorithmic means. Micro-tasks exhibiting interesting patterns and worker behaviors, for example labeling or tagging a set of objects, are utilized for machine learning and could be used in deep learning. The current approach to understanding crowdsourced human input is vital for the further development of machine learning models and approaches.

The rapid rise in the use of international platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), Microworkers, and Crowdflower demonstrate the considerable growth of Crowdsourcing in recent years. Consequently, CrowdPrecision aims at combining the success of these traditional Crowdsourcing platform providers with the benefits of current developments in Blockchain Technology and using cryptocurrencies.