Building crowds of humans into software

August 29, 2011 | Source: Technology Review

Enabling software to punt its toughest tasks to humans should result in smarter mobile apps and other programs, say the founders of MobileWorks. It makes it possible for programmers to build human intelligence into their software using crowdsourcing  — the practice of parceling out relatively small parts of a larger problem to many different people over the Web.

Existing crowdsourcing services involve a person filling out an online form to specify a task to be completed. By contrast, MobileWorks takes on jobs sent in by software using application programming interfaces (APIs), which allow one piece of software to tap into another. MobileWorks’s software translates the job sent in over its APIs into tasks distributed to the company’s crowd of workers. The results are then collated and sent back to the software that made the request, which behaves as if it got the answer from another piece of software, not a crowd of humans.