Crowdsourcing change

This paper discusses the role of computing in engendering cooperation in social dilemmas such as sustainability and public health. These cooperative dilemmas exist at a large scale, within heterogeneous populations. Motivated by analysis of cooperation from empirical field studies, we argue that an integrative computational framework that analyzes social signals and verifies behaviors through smartphone sensors can shape and mold individual decisions to cooperate. We discuss four interconnected technical challenges and example solutions. The challenges include community discovery algorithms for construction of small homogenous groups, persuasion of individuals in resource constrained networks, activity monitoring in the wild and detection of large scale social coordination. We briefly discuss new applications that arise from a computational infrastructure for cooperation, including fighting childhood obesity, cybersecurity and improving public safety.