Hybrid Machine-Crowd Interaction for Handling Complexity: Steps Toward a Scaffolding Design Framework

Much research attention on crowd work is paid to the development of solutions for enhancing microtask crowdsourcing settings. Although decomposing difficult problems into microtasks is appropriate for many situations, several problems are non-decomposable and require high levels of coordination among crowd workers. In this chapter, we aim to gain a better understanding of the macrotask crowdsourcing problem and the integration of crowd-AI mechanisms for solving complex tasks distributed across expert crowds and machines. We also explore some design implications of macrotask crowdsourcing systems taking into account their scaling abilities to support complex work in science.