Crowdsourcing is the idea that a company outsources the tasks that are previously done by employees to a group of undefined virtual crowd, who share the same interest and passion. Many forms of crowdsourcing exist in the world. iStockPhoto is an example of crowdsourcing. Although the participants on this platform aren't hired by anyone, they have the market demand in mind while they are shooting photos. Grid computing allows volunteers to have their idle computers help compute a small piece of some large-scale projects. BOINC is a grid computing project that is being held in Berkeley. Volunteers only have to register and download the software. It will run automatically when the computer is idle.
I find that both crowdsourcing and grid computing have something in common. First of all, they benefited from the established internet. Internet speed has grown a lot over the past decade. It is one of the main reasons why crowdsourcing and grid computing have been prospering as well. Imagine if we lived in the old modem world, how could crowsourcing and grid computing be feasible? From our guest speaker's speech, the system that he is developing is a real-time competition for participants. If your internet is faster, you could probably work on more tiny problems and earn more rewards. Although time is not a critical issue for grid computing, it does require smooth internet connection in order to transfer data that needs calculation and the result. Especially, other computations might depends on your result. Thus, internet speed is indispensable to both.
Secondly, both require the involvement from a large group of unknown people in order to be time efficient. Regarding the translation crowdsourcing project that was mentioned in class, each piece of paper or essay is divided into snippets. Each contributor will work on their piece of snippet. Meanwhile, contributors are unknown to the manager. Grid computing is exactly the same, with the exception that the algorithm substitutes the manager. As many people can contribute to different parts of the project simultaneously, grid computing and crowdsourcing requires less time than the sequential way.
Without the established internet and the heavy involvement from the online population, crowdsourcing and grid computing will only be innovative uses of computing power on the paper. Besides time efficiency as many computations or tasks can be completed in parallel, they are also economically effective.
Buying computers to process large data is not as expensive as it used to be. One can buy a $200 computers easily these days. However, it is not the total expense. Buying more computers implicitly means more spaces, more fans and more staff to maintain. The total expenditure might be scary enough. But now, you might only need a few servers computing and connecting to clients (volunteers). It is less overhead and maintaining fees for grid computing. As for crowdsourcing, the company can employ less staff. The one-time overhead is the developing expenses for the coordinating platform and the set up fees. Although the company has to reward online participants and hire a manager to coordinate the project, it is usually might cheaper than hiring permanent staff.
Grid computing is very similar to crowdsourcing in terms of economical factor and the dependency on the maturity of the internet infrastructure and the participation rate. However, crowdsourcing seems to generate more law issues, ethical problems and employment benefits than merely grid computing. Will you go for crowdsourcing? It is hard to say. But if I were the employer, why not?
6 comments:
There's another type of software that we can all download for measuring earthquakes. Grid computing is cool, but I think that crowdsourcing is much more valuable. I don't think that there are that many projects that can benefit from grid computing, whereas all sorts of projects could benefit from crowdsourcing.
My favorite example of crowdsourcing is ChaCha. My little brother texts ChaCha regularly for information. He does not have a smart phone, so asking ChaCha "What was the name of Charlie's band in LOST?" is his way around Googling from a mobile phone. And, from what I understand, another human being on a computer looks up the information and texts it back to you and gets some sort of commission per response. And, as the guest speaker mentioned, creating a system of incentives is essential for this type of crowdsourcing. I think it is great to have people compete for a certain job/task.
Crowdsourcing benefits businesses and users to an extent only. It works great for jobs that does not require physically doing something. Examples include servicing a car, making food, or cleaning your home.
Crowdsourcings resembles informational forums but at a higher efficiency due to incentives for faster responses. I regularly search forums learning how to paint and fix my car but at times it annoys me because it takes time for the community to respond to a question when I need to know it right then. One explanation for this is there is no incentive for people to respond to you. They do so out of generosity and if they see that your problem is very basic they would even ignore you. Thus I believe that forums such as these can really attract more people if they provide some sort of incentives/commission for those who contribute/help solve problems.
I do believe that crowd sourcing can be a cost cutting strategy for businesses, but it can also be very costly in time, decision making and outcome. As a business, I would definitely make an investment in crowdsourcing though.
I think crowd sourcing could be the Internet equivalent of the assembly line. It breaks a complicated problem into smaller easier pieces that could be done by relatively unskilled workers. This would be efficient as the repetition makes the workers faster and cheap because the work requires little skill. Also the workforce wouldn't be impacted by geographical constraints. Unlike a factory, where all the workers have to live close by, crowd sourcing allows for people to collaborate from across the world.
I think crowd sourcing could be the Internet equivalent of the assembly line. It breaks a complicated problem into smaller easier pieces that could be done by relatively unskilled workers. This would be efficient as the repetition makes the workers faster and cheap because the work requires little skill. Also the workforce wouldn't be impacted by geographical constraints. Unlike a factory, where all the workers have to live close by, crowd sourcing allows for people to collaborate from across the world.
I had never heard of Grid computing before. I am not so sure that I would like it, at least for my personal computer. I do, however, understand the benefits that it can produce. But again, like crowdsourcing, it is limited to the types of actions it can do. Yes crowdsourcing works, but not for every task, and yes grid computing works. But I am sure that with people constantly using there computers, there has to be issues with the computing starting and stopping. Not to mention, I think most people are like me and do not want something using their computer when they are not.
Hello. I am doing a little research about Computing. And I find this great Open Access book “ Grid Computing” ( free to download and share ). This book approaches the grid computing with a perspective on the latest achievements in the field, providing an insight into the current research trends and advances, and presenting a large range of innovative research papers. The topics covered in this book include resource and data management, grid architectures and development, and grid-enabled applications. You can find it here: http://www.intechopen.com/books/show/title/advances-in-grid-computing Cheers!
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