Aditya parameswaran speaks out on human-powered computation

ACM SIGMOD Record's Series of Interviews with distinguished members of the database community is presented. As a result, one needs to rely on humans as an integral part of the computation. So the system, DataSift, figures out the right way of decomposing this query into the set of small tasks that are done by humans, as well as automated tasks, which are done by the algorithm, and then combining the two to give accurate results. As it turns out, a lot of companies use crowdsourcing at a large scale. So companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, all of them use crowdsourcing at a large scale and they are often ashamed to admit it because it is their secret sauce.