Civil engineering involves complex tasks that require high accuracy of results. Therefore, engineers with trained expertise are essential to the completion of the tasks, and the workplace cannot solely rely on crowd workers who do not have that expertise. The applications of the findings from this study focused on using crowd workers as a large labor pool to assist with expert engineering labor rather than relying on the crowd workers to complete the tasks themselves, with intentions of creating a more efficient and productive workplace. 

University of Texas at Austin

This experiment assessed the limitations of crowdsourcing as a method of completing difficult, complex tasks. The researchers aimed to find out how large groups of untrained crowd workers could be used to work on civil engineering tasks in order to expand the available workforce beyond just specialized engineers. This would increase overall productivity in the formal workplace by allowing certain tasks to be designated to crowd workers. As a result, crowd work could be utilized in specific situations in which there must be a large amount of time-sensitive work done, such as rebuilding infrastructure after a natural disaster.

Introduction (Crowdsourcing Complex Engineering Tasks)

Staffelbach M, Sempolinski P, Kijewski-Correa T, Thain D, Wei D, Kareem A, et al. (2015). Lessons Learned from Crowdsourcing Complex Engineering Tasks. PLoS ONE 10(9): e0134978. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0134978


Lessons Learned from Crowdsourcing Complex Engineering Tasks

Concerns about Crowdsourcing Complex Engineering Tasks

The tasks given to crowd workers in this experiment were more complex than regular crowdsourcing tasks, as the workers had to read tutorials and undergo training before they completed the tasks. These tasks consisted of evaluating and analyzing the results of wind simulations. They were instructed to filter out the bad simulation results so that the expert engineers would have more time to work with the good simulation results. The objective was to determine the effectiveness of training the crowd workers in order to produce accurate results. After training, the workers were able to perform the tasks with ample accuracy that benefitted the expert labor.

Training Crowd Workers (Crowdsourcing Complex Engineering Tasks)

A Virtual Wind Tunnel simulation was created by the researchers as a material for this study. This simulation was a portal in which the users could upload building designs which would be analyzed to determine how the structures would be affected by wind. The complex tasks involved in the Virtual Wind Tunnel required training, as they were initially unfamiliar to the crowd workers. Each worker had to read a lengthy tutorial in order to understand the basic concepts involved in the simulation.

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