Programming Hybrid Services in the Cloud

For solving complex problems, we advocate for constructing “social computers” which combine software and human services. However, to date, human capabilities cannot be easily programmed into applications in a similar way like software capabilities. Existing approaches exploiting human capabilities via crowds do not support well on-demand, proactive, team-based human computation. In this paper, we explore a new way to virtualize, provision and to program human capabilities using cloud computing concepts and service delivery models. We propose novel methods for modeling clouds of human-based services and combine human-based services with software-based services to establish clouds of hybrid services. In our model, we present common APIs, similar to APIs for software services, to access individual and team-based compute units in clouds of human-based services. Based on that, we propose frameworks and programming primitives for hybrid services. We illustrate our concepts via some examples of using our cloud APIs and existing cloud APIs for software.