Crowdsourcing — Becoming One With the Crowd

Right off the bat, I would like to establish that, although crowdsourcing and its purpose is pretty ubiquitous, I had never really heard about it, nor understood its importance in the development of artificial intelligence and other applications. The first thing that I thought of when visiting this topic was this website that I had used in high school called freerice (https://freerice.com/) which basically prompts users to complete vocabulary and spelling challenges in order to donate a certain amount of rice depending on the correctness of your answers. It was a fun little game that utilized human skills to donate rice to countries in need. Now, I was never sure if that rice was every actually being donated, but I do know that I liked the idea of being able to login at any time and “make a difference” with minimal effort. This prompted my thinking that such a simple task, spread out across a large population could really lead to a difference being made which, falls directly into the purpose of crowdsourcing principles. With that being said, before I made an account with Amazon for their own “crowdsourcing marketplace”, Mechanical Turk, I went into the experience with an open mind, hoping to help some people out and make some quick, easy money. The idea of having a super loose schedule while working remotely, paired with the prospect of making money made for the possibility of a really pleasurable experience with MTurk. So I gave it a try and, unfortunately, it requires you to wait a couple days before you can register as an “employee”, so I had to select a different crowdsourcing technology for this particular assignment, although I do intend to test out MTurk when I am cleared to work on their HITs (Human intelligence tasks). Instead of MTurk, I decided to try out a game that supports the study of unfolding proteins found at  https://fold.it/portal/. This website does not provide a monetary incentive but rather a motivation to further the understanding of proteins and the development of disease cures. Foldit requires you to download some software in order to contribute, which is super straightforward and took about 3-5 minutes to download. After you have the software downloaded, you can hop right into the game which is super intuitive and easy to learn. If you have any issues understanding your tasks, there is always a tutorial with pop-ups that prompts your next moves to get you closer to completing the puzzle for each level. The game itself is pretty satisfying, especially when you get to more complex structures. There is also an extremely low margin of error, making the experience significantly more enjoyable. It reminds me a lot of a airport or waiting room game that people would use to take up time, but with the added incentive to do good and contribute to the scientific community, it actually leaves the user feeling like they just spent their time doing something meaningful rather than wasting it. Despite the lack of monetary compensation, I think that this game captures your attention and even motivates the user to continue playing by utilizing its ease of use, availability of hints, and contribution to a noble cause. Although I did not have a chance to try out Amazon’s MTurk technology, I think that this software is an effective application of crowdsourcing and embodies characteristics that maintain a strong user base; effectively furthering its mission to improve research opportunities in disease and protein study and its appropriate applications.