Berger presents AutoMan computing platform at Rome conference
Emery Berger, associate professor of Computer Science, delivered an invited talk on “Programming with People: Integrating Human-Based and Digital Computation” at the European Joint Conferences on Theory & Practice of Software (ETAPS) held March 22 in Rome.Berger discussed AutoMan, the first fully automatic crowdprogramming system, which makes it possible to write programs that rely on people to perform computations that are difficult or impossible for computers to do.
AutoMan integrates human-based computations into a standard programming language as ordinary function calls, which can be intermixed freely with traditional functions. This abstraction allows AutoMan programmers to focus on their programming logic. An AutoMan program specifies a confidence level for the overall computation and a budget.
The AutoMan runtime system then transparently manages all details necessary for scheduling, pricing, and quality control. AutoMan automatically schedules human tasks for each computation until it achieves the desired confidence level; monitors, re-prices and restarts human tasks as necessary; and maximizes parallelism across human workers while staying under budget.
AutoMan is available for download at www.automan-lang.org.
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Monday, April 1, 2013
