Content exploitation: men and machines

DG Connect -Unit G1 – Converging Media and ContentBruxelles, June 16 2014

Piero Fraternali, Politecnico di Milanopiero.fraternali@polimi.it

What content?

Corporate content• Google is indexing the earth

User generated content• Video IP traffic will be 73% of all

Internet traffic by 2017. The sum of all forms of video (TV, VoD, Internet, and P2P) ~ 80-90% [Cisco, 2013]

• 250+ billion photos uploaded and 350+ million photos uploaded every day [Facebook, 2013]

• “Big data” is (mostly) visual data

How to exploit UGC

So many applications But .. so much garbage

The human computation trust circle

people

data

Passive crowdsourcingActive crowdsourcingCrowdsourcing optimizationIncentivesTrust computingAdversarial computing

Provenance trackingTampering detectionUncertainty modeling and reductionSemantic enrichment

algorithmsReliabilityOptimizationPredictive modelingQuality guarantee

FOCUS HERE

Example: incentives

• Problem: identify 10 balloons anchored in 10 undisclosed locations in the US, $ 40,000 prize to the winner

• Solution in less than 9 hours

• Recursive incentive mechanism (Nash equilibrium)

Another (different) incentive scheme

• Complex content (3d with constraints)

• Computationally intractable

• Solved with Tetris-like game

• Massive voluntary online collaboration, community quality monitoring

How to compute people Influence & Trust

How to fight adversariesGoal• Obtain quality content with

minimum amount of human and computational resources

• Algorithm can fail• But humans can cheat!

Object detection example

In summary

• Exploiting content requires .. good content• Computers and humans can cooperate in new ways

– More than algorithm optimization– More than crowdsourcing

• Old problem, but at a new scale– "On two occasions I have been asked,

"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

– Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864)