Computing the incomputable with human processing units

Corney, Jonathan; Vasantha, Gokula Annamalai; Lynn, Andrew; Jagadeesan, Ananda; Acur, Nuran; Smith, Marisa; Agarwal, Anupam

Abstract

Initially commercial crowdsourcing services (such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) were focused largely on providing micro-labor services for tasks such as image labeling and text processing. However it is becoming increasingly apparent that these services can also be regarded as providing parallel, on-demand, networks of (so-called) ‘Human Processing Units’ (HPUs). Such services are able to provide specialist computational facilities in a manner analogous to the way Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) support the specialist process of high speed rendering. This paper describes how this new technology could extend the functionality of mechanical CAD/CAM or PLM systems. Crucial to the commercial feasibility of such systems is the ability to access networks of HPUs where engineering data can be processed securely (unlike open crowdsourcing sites such as mTurk). The paper reports the initial results of work done to establish the feasibility of a proposed architecture for integrating HPUs into desktop CAD that uses established BPO centers in rural India to provide a secure source of geometric intelligence.

Citation

Corney, J., Vasantha, G. A., Lynn, A., Jagadeesan, A., Acur, N., Smith, M., & Agarwal, A. (2013). Computing the incomputable with human processing units. In Intelligent interactive technologies and multimedia (14-24). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37463-0_2

• Conference Name: International Conference on Intelligent Interactive Technologies and Multimedia IITM 2013
• Conference Location: Allahabad, India
• Start Date: Mar 9, 2013
• End Date: Mar 11, 2013
• Publication Date: 2013
• Deposit Date: Feb 15, 2019
• Publisher: Springer
• Pages: 14-24
• Series Title: Communications in Computer and Information Science
• Series Number: 276
• Book Title: Intelligent interactive technologies and multimedia
• ISBN: 9783642374623
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37463-0_2
• Keywords: Crowdsourcing, human processing units, CAD/CAM, BPO
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/1393705