Paper accepted for HCOMP 2019

HCOMP 2019 logo

The Crowd Lab had a paper, titled, “Second Opinion: Supporting last-mile person identification with crowdsourcing and face recognition,” accepted for the upcoming AAAI Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2019) conference at the Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, WA, USA, October 28-30, 2019. The conference had a 25% acceptance rate.

Ph.D. student and lead author Vikram Mohanty will present the paper, co-authored with Dr. Luther and Crowd Lab undergraduate researchers Kareem Abdol-Hamid and Courtney Ebersohl. Here’s the paper’s abstract:

As AI-based face recognition technologies are increasingly adopted for high-stakes applications like locating suspected criminals, public concerns about the accuracy of these technologies have grown as well. These technologies often present a human expert with a shortlist of high-confidence candidate faces from which the expert must select correct match(es) while avoiding false positives, which we term the “last-mile problem.” We propose Second Opinion, a web-based software tool that employs a novel crowdsourcing workflow inspired by cognitive psychology, seed-gather-analyze, to assist experts in solving the last-mile problem. We evaluated Second Opinion with a mixed-methods lab study involving 10 experts and 300 crowd workers who collaborate to identify people in historical photos. We found that crowds can eliminate 75% of false positives from the highest-confidence candidates suggested by face recognition, and that experts were enthusiastic about using Second Opinion in their work. We also discuss broader implications for crowd–AI interaction and crowdsourced person identification.

Author: Kurt Luther

Dr. Kurt Luther is an associate professor of computer science and (by courtesy) history at Virginia Tech, where he directs the Crowd Intelligence Lab.