Tech Companies Draw on 'Wisdom of the Crowds'

An anonymous reader writes "News.com is carrying an article on a 'mini-conference' held at Yahoo's HQ this past Wednesday. The get-together put representatives from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and HP together to talk about their experiments with predictive networks. The 'wisdom of the crowds' allows these companies to make use of the collective knowledge their employees hold to answer important questions for the company." From the article: "David Pennock, a principal research scientist at Yahoo Research, said the company has created a currency called a Yootle. It's described as a 'scorekeeping system for favors owed.' Pennock offered as an example a programmer offering to write a piece of code for a few Yootles. Or, when organizing a dinner outing, one employee could use an internal SMS tool to bid 2 Yootles for Italian and 4 Yootles for Mexican. 'If you don't get to go to the restaurant you want to, you get compensation' in Yootles, he said. Related to Yootles is Yahoo Research's experiment with a fantasy prediction market for technology called the Tech Buzz Game. It's a modified version of software licensed from NewsFutures in conjunction with O'Reilly Media and features topics like Atlantic hurricanes and portable media devices. Winners are those who predict how popular a topic will be on Yahoo Search. "

Comments

I am surprised it took this long...

[BWJones]

I am surprised it took them this long to implement as a similar project was implemented at select federal intelligence agencies through DARPA funding back in early 2002 to evaluate possible intelligence leads and threats to national security. Unfortunately the Total Information Awareness program developed out of this work and the true benefits of predictive networks using human intelligence have not really panned out due to an almost pathological reliance and worship of technology supplanting human intelligence rather then supplementing it. Only more recently have projects based on simple, yet tremendously technologies such as wikis been gaining more traction.

Re:I am surprised it took this long...

[ScentCone]

I am surprised it took them this long to implement as a similar project was implemented at select federal intelligence agencies through DARPA funding back in early 2002 to evaluate possible intelligence leads and threats to national security.

You may also recall that a particularly bad round of reporting on some related work (wherein people in the defense/intel world were "gambling" futures on which head of state, for example, would next come under attack from within, etc) resulted in headlines like "Government Officials Place Assassination Bets." They actually had to shut that one down because the media idiots got enough people to make congress creatures uncomfortable. I hope they just moved the research out of the bright lights and kept it up, but it just goes to show you that these slightly odd-seeming areas of research can be wildly misinterpreted by people who get all of their interpretation in 10-second sound bites. Um, or slashdot summaries.

Wisdom of the crowds = part of the long tail?

[dada21]

I've been playing with a collaborative filter engine called CRITEO that is completely blowing my mind in how it opens opportunities to gain that "wisdom of the crowds" bit for the average user -- not just huge companies like Amazon or these emergent venture capitalized corporations. Over the past 2 weeks I've been working on some Wordpress code to actually integrate this relevancy predictor (my results should be forthcoming by the first week of January) and it really seems like you NEED a predictive filtering engine to utilize the crowds to give each individual within the crowd relevant results as compared to just generic "ratings."

This Yootle system is interesting, but it doesn't go far enough. Just because the crowds skew towards a majority opinion doesn't mean that opinion is relevant to the majority (I know it sounds weird). Each individual will have certain likes and dislikes within that majority opinion. Without some sort of relevancy predictor, the "majority vote" is useless.

Hopefully we will see more people utilizing systems such as CRITEO's to actually take the input of the masses (thousands, millions, or even billions of decisions and ratings) and run them through a real-time engine to give everyone a unique view of what they might want/need/like/hate/etc. As I spent more time beating on trying to come up with my own quick/real-time solution, the more I realized that using someone else's services let me focus on what is best for my customer -- my content, generally.

The prediction system to rank Yahoo searches is very 2005 -- it really just capitalizes on the likes of the masses, which means it is hitting the top head of the long tail rather than the more important remaining 80%. I'd love to see a search engine that allows you to "rate" your search results or even individual search results in real time, maybe in collaboration with a system like CRITEO. Anyone interested in working on one? I'd be willing to bet that such an investment of time would give many of us a better search engine that actually returns results that are relevant to the individual's tastes rather than the masses' collective "favorites" which are usually way off base. It would also reduce the spam results greatly and open the door to the wisdom of the masses actually making a difference for each individual. What I like about collaborative filter is that 5 seconds per user can mean days or weeks saved for that user in the long run because of the 5 seconds "donated" by the million others.

Re:I think this has a name

[maomoondog]

The problem with Birch's scheme is that individuals are incentivized to lie about what they want in order to get more money from the group. In the example given where Charles is willing to subsidize a trip to Chinese food, you could extract extra money from him by pretending it's a huge disappointment to you.

For a strategyproof scheme, check out the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism. Basically, everyone gives weighted votes about something, and the winners of the tally pay a penalty equal to the imposition they caused the rest of the people. Only trouble is, this penalty has to be completely discarded to prevent hyjinx...