A Survey of General-Purpose Crowdsourcing Techniques

Since Jeff Howe introduced the term Crowdsourcing in 2006, this human-powered problem-solving paradigm has gained a lot of attention and has been a hot research topic in the field of computer science. Even though a lot of work has been conducted on this topic, so far we do not have a comprehensive survey on most relevant work done in the crowdsourcing field. In this paper, we aim to offer an overall picture of the current state of the art techniques in general-purpose crowdsourcing. According to their focus, we divide this work into three parts, which are: incentive design, task assignment, and quality control. For each part, we start with different problems faced in that area followed by a brief description of existing work and a discussion of pros and cons. In addition, we also present a real scenario on how the different techniques are used in implementing a location-based crowdsourcing platform, gMission. Finally, we highlight the limitations of the current general-purpose crowdsourcing techniques and present some open problems in this area.