Towards crowdsourcing spatial manufacturing tasks from rural India

Vasantha, Gokula; Corney, Jonathan; Jagadeeshan, Ananda; Lynn, Andrew; Acur Bakir, Nuran; Smith, Marisa; Agrawal, Anupam

Abstract

Many tasks involving production software that involve spatial reasoning can only produce "good" rather than optimum solutions. It is frequently possible for humans to improve on algorithmically generated solutions computed by CAD/CAM software. The thesis motivating this research is that large numbers of industrial optimisation tasks involving spatial reasoning (such as 2D part nesting) can be outsourced as human intelligence tasks to rural workers to provide a sustainable source of skilled employment. We hypothesis that 3D spatial reasoning ability is essential to solve spatial optimization tasks. In this paper we reported the 3D spatial manipulation ability of eighty rural workers in four rural business process outsourcing (BPO) centres in India. The assessments reveal that although the average spatial manipulation ability is less than the literature reported benchmark, there are talented workers identified in all the four rural centres, and the results identify priority activities required to enable the proposed approach

Citation

Vasantha, G., Corney, J., Jagadeeshan, A., Lynn, A., Acur Bakir, N., Smith, M., & Agrawal, A. (2014). Towards crowdsourcing spatial manufacturing tasks from rural India. In F. Rehman, N. Woodfine, & R. Marasini (Eds.), Advance in Manufacturing Technology XXVIII: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Manufacturing Research

• Conference Name: 12th International Conference on Manufacturing Research
• Conference Location: Southampton, UK
• Start Date: Sep 9, 2014
• End Date: Sep 11, 2014
• Acceptance Date: Jul 9, 2014
• Publication Date: Sep 9, 2014
• Deposit Date: Dec 21, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 20, 2019
• Journal: G TEC H N O LO
• Series ISSN: 2053-3373
• Book Title: Advance in Manufacturing Technology XXVIII: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Manufacturing Research
• ISBN: 9780992695842
• Keywords: crowdsourcing, optimization task, rural worker
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/1393595
• Publisher URL: https://www.academia.ed...uring_technology_XXviii