Orchid Project

Alex and I recently attended the Machine Learning for Sustainability workshop at the NIPS 2011 conference: http://people.csail.mit.edu/kolter/mlsust11/doku.php?id=introduction I was presenting my work on energy disaggregation and Alex was giving an invited talk on the smart grid. Both talks generated quite a bit of interest for the work we all do in ORCHID, so anyone working […]

After months of development by Dong, Ruben, and Bing, CollabMap is finally live. Go to http://www.collabmap.org and perform simple tasks to help us build an accurate map of Fawley for the purpose of computer simulations (and ‘like’ it on facebook/google/twitter!). General Info: CollabMap is a crowdsourcing platform designed by researchers in the Agents, Interaction, and […]

http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html He talks about CAPTCHA and DUOLINGO (a crowdsourced language learning tool!) Gopal

They ask you questions about your energy use, and then send you an energy action plan – how to save energy, save money and shrink your ‘carbon footprint’. It’s free to use. Probably related to the energy quiz idea: http://www.edfenergy.com/products-services/for-your-home/energy-saving-advice/free-home-energy-survey.shtml

http://www.pavegen.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn88oxf6BDQ&feature=share&fb_source=message

Interesting company specialising in building games for behaviour change and training – http://playgen.com/. Alex

Interesting paper from Michael Jordon on bias mitigation in crowd sourcing – http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jordan/papers/wauthier-jordan-nips12.pdf Alex

A smart thermostat that claims to learn the user preferences and self-program itself: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20124057-52/ipod-creators-next-quest-making-thermostats-sexy/ http://www.nest.com/index.html

Hi everyone, Nick suggested I circulate a paper describing our recent work on crowdsourcing and mechanism design. Motivated by the Red Balloon Challenge, we present a simple model for crowdsourced information gathering where verification of reports is encouraged through penalties and monetary compensation. We derive an optimal way to distribute the reward among the agents […]