INTERVIEW: Professor David Grier on using Crowdsourcing for Scientific Progress and Development

Dr. David Alan Grier is an Associate Professor of International Science and Policy and International Affairs at The Elliot School of International Affairs, George Washington University. Professor Grier is the author of When Computers Were Human (Princeton, 2005) and Too Soon to Tell (John Wiley, 2009). He was also recently elected as 2012 IEEE President. Professor Grier recently gave a talk, entitled “Crowdsourcing and Social Computation in International Development,” and was kind enough to meet with me to discuss the highlights of his presentation.

As the world tries to keep up to speed with the rapid pace of technological change, we can’t help but wonder how these scientific advances are changing the way science itself is done. Walls seem to be coming down everywhere as the internet facilitates communication and transfer of information; new communication technologies allow for the average citizen to participate in extensive data collection and sharing. The buzz seems to be around crowdsourcing and social media. Citizen-based science, participatory sensing, and volunteered geographic information (VGI) are all examples of crowdsourcing: using large-scale labor markets to get work done. Citizen-based science is any scientific work, such as data collection, that can be done by those without formal scientific or technical training; participatory sensing uses large labor markets of citizens as sensors for the world around them, and can make use of smartphones and other mobile sensing devices. Volunteered geographic information usually involves qualitative observations from average citizens about the physical observations made about a particular place that could go to constructing a contributor-based map or database. This work can be as simple as taking pictures, writing up a short description of what you see, and uploading it onto a website, or much more complex and specialized tasks, such as using software to bend protein structures to contribute to immense databases (Folding@Home).