Crowd computing systems are now capable of doing more sophisticated work than ever before, accelerating the pace of creative work such as creating movies, carrying out research, and writing stories. How can crowds be used to automate software creation? This is a complex problem, requiring good methods for expert selection, program synthesis and collaboration. We’ll discuss strategies for accelerating software creation using crowds of geographically-diverse communities of software engineers, as well as the cultural and technical challenges that emerge.
We’ll also discuss several open problems in crowd computing, including efforts by our team and others to create a crowdsourcing compiler, a hypothetical system that can optimally divide an open-ended task between artificial intelligence systems and teams of humans. These systems blur the line between crowd-powered software and real-world organizations, raising important questions about the future of work.
Anand is founder of Crowdbotics, a startup using crowdsourcing and machine intelligence to accelerate the process of software development. Crowdbotics brings developers from new-to-coding communities worldwide into a global community of software engineers that collaborate 1-1 with technology companies. Prior to that, Anand was Chief Scientist of LeadGenius, a Y Combinator-backed startup using human computation and deep learning to automate account-based marketing (ABM). Anand has been named as one of Forbes Magazine’s “30 under 30” Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30. Anand has published in ACM, AAAI and IEEE magazines, journals, and conferences. Anand previously held a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship in mathematics. He holds degrees in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Mathematics, and Physics from UC Berkeley.