Summary Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are developing a new database system, called Qurk, that will automatically crowdsource tasks that are difficult or impossible to perform computationally. Images stored in a standard database system, for example, could be sorted according to date of creation or some other data tag, whether applied automatically or by hand. Images in a Qurk database, however, could be sorted according to the approximate age of the people depicted, or the appeal of the depicted locations as travel destinations, or any other attribute whose assessment would require human judgment.

Description Crowdsourcing is particularly useful for tasks that are trivial for humans but difficult, if not impossible, for computers. The paradigmatic such task is image recognition: Even the most complex, time-consuming image-recognition algorithms can't identify objects in images nearly as consistently as people can. So in their experiments, the researchers concentrated on databases of images. On all three Qurk papers, Marcus, Wu and Miller have been joined by professors Sam Madden and David Karger, both of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.