Making Collective Wisdom Wiser

Many popular sites, such as Wikipedia and Tripadvisor, rely on public participation to gather information---a process known as crowd data sourcing. While this kind of collective intelligence is extremely valuable, it is also fallible, and policing such sites for inaccuracies or missing material is a costly undertaking. In this talk we will examine how database technology can be put to work to effectively gather information from the public, efficiently moderate the process, and identify questionable input with minimal human interaction. We will consider the logical, algorithmic, and methodological foundations for the management of large scale crowd-sourced data as well as the development of applications over such information.