{"id":1816,"date":"2014-10-21T21:22:23","date_gmt":"2014-10-21T21:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=1816"},"modified":"2016-08-08T05:46:11","modified_gmt":"2016-08-08T05:46:11","slug":"crowdsourcing-competitions-often-hijacked-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/crowdsourcing-competitions-often-hijacked-study\/","title":{"rendered":"Crowdsourcing competitions often hijacked: study"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Charis Palmer<\/a>, The Conversation<\/em><\/p>\n

Crowdsourcing competitions, popular with companies seeking to tap into groups of knowledge, are often diminished by malicious behaviour, according to a new study<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The research, published today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, found the opennesss of crowdsourced competitions, particularly those with a \u201cwinner takes all\u201d prize, made them vulnerable to attack.<\/p>\n

The researchers used game theory to analyse the trade off between the potential for increased productivity from crowdsourcing a project, and the possibility of it being set back by malicious behaviour. They cited the DARPA Network Challenge<\/a> as an example of a hijacked crowdsourcing competition, in which the organisers were left to sort through many fake submissions, including fabricated pictures of people impersonating DARPA officials.<\/p>\n

Research leader and University of Southampton computer scientist Victor Naroditskiy said companies should consider malicious behaviour a cost of crowdsourcing, given the research showed it was the norm.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur work enhances the understanding of the strategic forces coming into play in crowdsourcing contests,\u201d Naroditskiy said.<\/p>\n

For example, the researchers found making attacks on crowdsourcing competitions more costly did not deter malicious behaviour, and simply led to more attacks by the weaker player in a contest.<\/p>\n

However, Dr Lubna Alam, assistant professor in information systems at the University of Canberra, said in her experience the benefits of crowdsourcing outweighed the cost of managing attacks.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a scepticism about crowdsourcing \u2013 people think when you involve crowds you run the risks of attacks and vandalism\u2026but there are many instances, particularly in non-profit contexts; for example the National library\u2019s newspaper digitisation project which had been running for more than five years and there hasn\u2019t been any cases of vandalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you trust the crowd, the crowd will trust you back and will give you in return much more than what you expected.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr Alam said the competition and contest part of crowdsourcing had gained momentum in Australia.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s still early days in terms of costing it, but people mostly use it when they don\u2019t have the expertise within the team or organisation, as a way of tapping into expertise from outside.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joseph Davis, professor of Information Systems and Services at the University of Sydney, said the results were generally useful at an abstract level.<\/p>\n

\u201cHowever, it is important to remember that the research is applicable to only a small subset of crowdsourcing, that is adversarial crowdsourcing contests,\u201d Prof Davis said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe findings are interesting, but the relevance to the broader context of crowdsourcing is somewhat limited.\u201d<\/p>\n

Professor Davis said crowdsourcing contest sites like Innocentive<\/a>) where there was no adversarial competition did not face the same problem of malicious behaviour.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are obvious quality control issues in all types of crowdsourcing, but effective mechanisms can be put in place to deal with them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>.
\nRead the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Charis Palmer, The Conversation Crowdsourcing competitions, popular with companies seeking to tap into groups of knowledge, are often diminished by malicious behaviour, according to a new study. The research, published today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, found the opennesss of crowdsourced competitions, particularly those with a \u201cwinner takes all\u201d prize, made […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":5260,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36],"tags":[1018,668,892,885,891,860],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1816"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1816"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5259,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1816\/revisions\/5259"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}