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Contribute to Crowdsourcing Historic Documents

May-20-11 By Aminda
With the lazy days of summer approaching, why not relax while contributing some of your time to some library research. A couple major libraries have received global attention for their successful efforts in crowdsourcing the transcription of archived work.

Comparing Corporate and Consumer Innovation

May-19-11 By Aminda
The New York Times recently reported on a large-scale survey of consumer innovation, financed by the British government. What the team discovered, was that the amount of money individual consumers spent making and improving products was more than twice as large as the amount spent by all British firms combined on product research and development over a three-year period.

The Effect of Social Influence on the Wisdom of the Crowd

May-18-11 By Aminda
A new study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds limitations on the premise that the average of many individuals’ estimates can be more accurate than that of individuals.

U.S. Navy Launches Problem-solving Platform

May-17-11 By Aminda
The U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) launched yesterday a new Internet wargame designed to solve the real-world problem of piracy facing the Navy.
The ONR has recruited 1,000 players from across the government, education and private sector to participate in a three-week Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI) exercise.
The initial challenge of combating piracy off the coast of Somalia is a demonstration of the platform, which is designed to support large numbers of distributed players in synchronous and asynchronous ideation and action planning, with an eye to surfacing innovative, outlier strategies.

How Crowdsourcing is Growing Interest in Science

May-16-11 By Aminda
This age of social media and interconnectivity is providing more and more ways for members of the public to contribute time and service towards scientific awareness and progress.

Applications to Aid the Blind

May-13-11 By Aminda
A recent post highlighted a project to refine the capabilities of Mechanical Turk for use in software applications. While MIT researchers work on that project, University of Rochester scientists have taken a similar concept and created a way to aid the blind.
VizWiz is an iPhone app that works in conjunction with a Turkit application, allowing a blind user to snap a photo of something, record a question about something shown in the photograph, and then receive an answer back within seconds. Designing a computer program that can reliably recognize text and distinguish objects in the real world has proven to be a massive challenge for artificial intelligence researchers.

Definition of Open Government

May-12-11 By Aminda
 

Embedding Workers in User Interfaces

May-11-11 By Aminda
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has become commonly known as the platform that has an interface which allows job-posters to have a job divided into small parts and distribute it among multiple workers for completion. Now developers are asking if that same, human-powered system can be refined as a software application along the same lines as Microsoft spell-checker.

Call for Innovation Writers

May-09-11 By Aminda
The European Alliance for Innovation (EAI) is developing a series of books and other print material on innovation that will utilize principles of open access to distribute the material in as free and open a manner as possible.
According to the website, “EAI publications utilize novel collaborative concepts to achieve shorter “time to market” with higher-review-quality publications, while providing a significantly increased impact by utilizing web technologies to obtain massively-connected diffusion systems.”

Making Farm Fans

May-06-11 By Aminda
A UK nonprofit dedicated to conservation has launched a unique campaign that has brought international attention to their work.
Capitalizing on the enormous success of the Facebook game Farmville, where players run a virtual farm, the National Trust is allowing participants to discuss and vote on what to buy and plant on a real 2,500 farm which is currently home to cattle, pigs, sheep and crops.