HP Labs India

CrowdCloud: Human augmented Cloud Computing

Optimization of business processes through extensive data collection and sophisticated analytics has become a strategic imperative for enterprises. The resulting demands of scale and more intelligent (human-like) analysis are often hard and/or expensive to meet using purely manual processing or purely machine computation. The vision of the CrowdCloud project is to support these enterprise imperatives by cost-effectively augmenting automated processing with on-demand crowdsourced human intelligence, by leveraging large populations of young, mobile-equipped and often underemployed people in countries such as India as an elastic workforce. The project aims to enable sophisticated business optimization solutions for enterprises, while enabling societal benefits in the form of employment opportunity and income generation.

Motivation

Optimization of business processes often requires extensive collection and deep analysis of unstructured data captured in the form of text, images, audio and video; however, state of art solutions available today do not always meet the requirements & expectations of enterprises. With the proliferation of mobile devices, social media and video data, traditional methods of understanding business effectiveness are facing disruption. It has become strategically important for enterprises to enable these new data streams and understand business performance through very sophisticated (human-like) analytics on the collected data.

In general, analytics on text and multimedia may require natural language speech understanding and translation, event spotting in audiovisual streams, handwritten document analysis etc. - "AI-complete" problems for which automated solutions are improving but still fall short of human performance. Similarly, the problem of large scale geographically distributed field data collection does not lend itself to any automated approach and current solutions require enterprises to have dedicated human resources for this effort.

Research Threads

CrowdCloud research focuses on achieving intelligent and effective orchestration of human effort and automation to meet the needs of enterprises. This requires inter-disciplinary research in areas such as:

  • Crowd recruitment
  • Optimal task scheduling
  • Augmented automated analysis
  • Mobile microtasking
Research Team
This page was last updated on October 26, 2012