Human-Machine Hybrid Computation

INTRODUCTION A common thread among fields such natural language processing, computer vision, and artificial intelligence is that all seek to automate tasks which humans do naturally. Examples include listening to human speech, seeing and recognizing objects, reading text, and understanding meaning. If they could be automated by computers, then they could be done on demand, and much more quickly and cheaply than human workers can do. However, for many problems, the quality provided by such algorithms is still too low to be used in applications that demand high accuracy and reliability. The other end of the spectrum is traditional human labor, in which workers can be hired to do the same types of tasks. Their accuracy is usually much higher than that of computers, but human workers take more time and require more money to do the same amount of work.