Extreme Crowdsourcing: From Balloons to Ethics

ABSTRACT: This talk explores the physical and cognitive limits of crowds, by following a number of real-world experiments that utilized social media to mobilize the masses in tasks of unprecedented complexity. From finding people in remote cities, to reconstructing shredded documents, the power of crowdsourcing is real, but so are exploitation, sabotage, and hidden biases that undermine the power of crowds.

BIO: Iyad Rahwan is the AT&T Career Development Professor and an Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Scalable Cooperation group. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and is an affiliate faculty at the MIT Institute of Data, Systems and Society (IDSS).