Crowdsourcing is a method of obtaining information, ideas, services, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, particularly from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. This approach leverages the collective intelligence and skills of a vast, diverse crowd to solve problems, generate ideas, and complete tasks.

Definition: Crowdsourcing combines the words “crowd” and “outsourcing.” It was first coined by Jeff Howe in a 2006 Wired magazine article. The concept is based on the idea that a large group of people can collectively contribute more diverse and substantial input than an individual or small team.

Popcorn Hack #1

What is a public dataset?

A public dataset is a freely accessible collection of data provided by organizations, governments, or research institutions. These datasets cover diverse topics and are available online for purposes such as research, analysis, and application development, promoting transparency and collaboration.

Examples of Data sets

Kaggle

  • Courses in visualization, tensorflow ai , and machine learning
  • Competitons - cash prizes, props
  • Notebooks- code, data, etc

Google public datasets

  • Free for the 1st terabyte

Data.gov

  • Uses government data to analyze markets, etc
  • Agriculture, energy, water, health

Widespread access to information and public data facilitates the identification of problems, development of solutions, and dissemination of results.

Popcorn Hack #2

What is distributed computing?

Answer: Distributed computing refers to the use of multiple interconnected computers or servers working together as a unified system. In this approach, tasks are divided and processed across different machines, often in a network, to achieve improved efficiency, speed, and scalability. It enables the parallel execution of computations, allowing large and complex tasks to be broken down into smaller, manageable parts. Distributed computing is commonly used in various fields, including data processing, scientific research, and cloud computing, to harness the collective processing power of multiple nodes in a network.

Distributed computing

  • Donate spare computing power to help other apps function

Example:

Boinc - University of California Berkley

  • Mathematics
  • Astrophysics
  • Climate
  • Minecraft
    • If you’ve ever played minecraft you should know what a map seed is. The algorithm in minecraft uses the seed to develop the world that people play on. This is another example of distributed computing.

These projects uses excess computing power in order to run these operations and projects. It is where individuals or organizations obtain ideas, services, or content by using contributions from a large group of individuals typically from an online community.

Innovations made possible with Crowdsourcing

Spotify

  • Colaborative playlists
  • Algorithm
    • Trains its algorithm by collecting and analyzing what other people are listening to.
  • Metadata

Crowdfunding

  • Kickstarter
    • An app where you can pitch your idea for other people to invest in your idea
  • IndeGoGo

Blockchain

  • Cryptocurrency
    • Uses much computing power from external people in order to process transactions. This is called “mining”.
  • Concert Tickets