Computation and Incentives in Social Computing

Social computing is a broad and evolving research area that concerns harnessing human intelligence to solve computational problems. The success of a social computing system relies on complex and dynamic interactions among people and computing technologies. My research group has focused on designing rules of interactions to achieve system-wide goals in social computing. We approach the design problem from three interleaving directions: algorithms and computational theory, theory of incentive alignment, and understanding of human social behavior. In this talk, I will present a few projects along these directions, with a common theme of understanding how to obtain high-quality contributions from participants in social computing.