MIT 6.S194 | Open Source Software Project Lab  

Remote Collaboration

Welcome and thank you to Adam Marcus, who will be guest lecturing today!

Adam is Director or Data at Locu, one of the hottest startups in local data. Behind the scenes, Adam designs and coordinates an impressive pipeline using both crowd-sourced labor and machine learning. While at MIT, Adam worked on a diverse range of research topics, including web data storage, web application optimization, computer assisted reporting, and the intersection of crowd-sourcing and database algorithms.

Audio from the talk: (download link)

See Also

Great talk by Jonathan Zittrain about some of the coming ethical questions surrounding crowd labor.

Journal Question

Due next Monday

Pick one of the questions below and answer in a ~half page response

  • What labor issues arise with crowd labor? Do these labor issues affect program correctness? Do they introduce ethical obligations for developers?
  • What data quality issues might arise with finely-grained crowdsourced labor? How could you mitigate this. Here's an interesting paper if you're interested in this question.
  • How do you break a big problem down into an automated sequence of little ones?
  • How can machine learning and crowd-sourcing interact to produce a more robust system? If you're trying to label images of cats, and you have one black box that does it via Mechanical Turk, and another black box that does it with machine learning, how do you decide which to use? Can you leverage them together?

Please submit your response by class time on each Monday. Here are the Journal guidelines and submission instructions.


Class List

  1. Introduction (W 2/6)
  2. Bootup (M 2/11)
  3. Become a Git Master (W 2/13)
  4. Everything you ever wanted to know about Web Requests (T 2/19)
  5. Design Studio (W 2/20)
  6. Debugging (M 2/25)
  7. Design Studio (W 2/27)
  8. Open Source Business Models (M 3/3)
  9. Design Studio (W 3/6)
  10. Work Day (W 3/11)
  11. Design Studio (W 3/13)
  12. Quantifying Code (M 3/18)
  13. Design Studio (W 3/20)
  14. Spring Break (M 3/25 & 27)
  15. Quantifying Users (M 4/1)
  16. Work day (W 4/3)
  17. Remote Collaboration (M 4/8)
  18. Design Studio (W 4/10)
  19. No class - Patriot's Day (M 4/15)
  20. Design Studio (W 4/17)
  21. Work Day (M 4/22)
  22. Design Studio (W 4/24)
  23. No class - CHI (M 4/29 and W 5/1)
  24. Final Presentations (M 5/6)
  25. Final Presentations (W 5/8)
  26. No class - WWW (M 5/13 and W 5/15)
  27. *Note: Report due W 5/15*