Fabio Casati

Business Processes for the Crowd Computer

Social networks and crowdsourcing platforms provide powerful means to execute tasks that require human intelligence instead of just machine computation power. Especially crowdsourcing has demonstrated its applicability in many fields, and a variety of platforms have been created for delegating small tasks to human solvers on the Web. However, creating applications that are structured, thus applications that combine more than a single task, is a complex and typically manual endeavor that requires many different interactions with crowdsourcing platforms. In this paper, we introduce the idea of a crowd computer, discuss its properties, and propose a programming paradigm for the development of crowdsourcing applications. In particular, we argue in favor of business processes as formalism to program the crowd computer and show how they enable the reuse of intricate crowdsourcing practices.

From a Simple Flow to Social Applications

Currently, there are a lot of people trying to leverage on the success of social networks by implementing social applications. However, implementing social applications is complex, due to the requirements and constraints put by the social networks to protect their data. In this work we present Simple Flow, a tool that simplifies the creation of social applications. Simple Flow proposes a processes-based approach to the design and execution of social applications. Simple Flow targets end-users and programmers with no experience in programming for social networks, giving them the possibility to design processes by concatenating social network actions (like post a message or comment a photo). For the execution of the designed processes Simple Flow interconnects, at runtime, template web pages (one page per action) according to the process design defined previously. These templates abstract the complexities of the interactions with social networks.