How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crowd

http://photos1.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/7/f/f/a/event_242132762.jpeg (http://locu.com)Join us as we kick off the Dogpatch Labs Tech Meetup with Dogpatcher Adam Marcus, Director of Data for Locu.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crowd

Crowdsourcing marketplaces like oDesk or Amazon's Mechanical Turk give us access to people all over the world that can solve various tasks, like virtual personal assistants, image labelers, or people that can clean up gnarly datasets. Humans can solve tasks that artificial intelligence is not yet able to solve, or needs help solving, without having to resort to complex machine learning or statistics. But humans are quirky: give them bad instructions, allow them to get bored, or make them do too repetitive a task, and they will start making mistakes. In this talk, I'll explain how to effectively benefit from crowd workers to solve your most challenging tasks, using examples from the wild and from our work at Locu.

http://photos4.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/7/c/e/4/event_242131972.jpegAdam Marcus
Adam is Locu's Director of Data. He recently completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at MIT, where his dissertation was on database systems and human computation. He is a recipient of the NSF and NDSEG fellowships, and has previously worked at ITA, Google, IBM, and FactSet. In his free time, he builds course content to get people excited about data and programming.

About Locu
Locu’s mission is to help local businesses thrive. With a patent-pending technology platform that digitizes and structures real-world data, Locu is building tools that help businesses connect with customers. http://locu.com