Crowd-Agents: Creating Crowd-Powered Interactive Systems

I create and deploy interactive systems that use a combination of human and machine intelligence to operate robustly in real-world settings. Unlike prior work in human computation, my “Crowd Agent” model allows crowds of people to support continuous real-time interactive systems that require ongoing context. For example, Chorus allows multi-session conversations with a virtual personal assistant; Scribe allows non-experts to caption speech in real time for deaf and hard of hearing users, where prior approaches were either not accurate enough, or required professionals with years of training; and Apparition allows designers to rapidly prototype new interactive interfaces from sketches in real time. In this talk, I will describe how computationally-mediated groups of people can solve problems that neither people nor computers can solve alone, and scaffold AI systems using the real-world data they collect.

Walter S. Lasecki is a Computer Science Ph.D. candidate at the University of Rochester working with Jeffrey Bigham (CMU) and James Allen (Rochester). He creates interactive intelligent systems that are robust enough to be used in real-world settings by combining both human and machine intelligence to exceed the capabilities of either. Mr. Lasecki received a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Virginia Tech in 2010, and an M.S. from the University of Rochester in 2011. He was named a Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellow in 2013, and has held visiting research positions at Stanford and Google[x]. Since 2013, he has been a Visiting Researcher at Carnegie Mellon University.