XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students

Labor-on-demand---it's like cloud computing but with human workers.

An associate professor at New York Universitys Stern School of Business uncovers answers about who are the employers in paid crowdsourcing, what tasks they post, and how much they pay.

While many organizations turn to human computation labor markets for jobs with black-or-white solutions, there is vast potential in asking these workers for original thought and innovation.

A professor and several PhD students at MIT examine the challenges and opportunities in human computation.

Can human computation bring together people from diverse backgrounds to solve age-old math problems?

Can people help computers solve challenging optimization problems?

Exploring Twitter and live events by structure and context can shed light on what people think.

Paid crowd workers are not just an API call---but all too often, they are treated like one.

Two computer scientists have created a video game about mice and elephants that can make computer encryption properly secure---as long as you play it randomly.

To find out how Amazon.com runs its marketplace for crowdsourced labor, we spoke to the vice president at the company responsible for it.