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FHWA Highway Safety Programs

APPENDIX B: NON-TRANSPORTATION EXAMPLES OF CROWD SOURCING

Some interesting examples of crowd sourcing/data collection that could provide some insight into potential applications for highway safety data include the following:

  • XPrize.org — http://www.xprize.org/. Crowd sourcing innovative solutions to world challenges.
  • Amazon Mechanical Turk — https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome. A crowdsourcing internet marketplace that enables what are described as requesters to identify human workers (referred to as providers) willing to perform tasks that computers are currently unable to do. For example, the workers might classify pictures. The workers are compensated at a very low level. This is referred to as Artificial Artificial Intelligence. (The duplication of the word "artificial" is intended.) This is an ideal solution for simple repetitive tasks and may have a use in transportation safety data for classifying collected elements.
  • Facewatch – https://www.facewatch.co.uk/. This is a crime prevention application in the United Kingdom. The public watches feeds from the vast number of closed circuit televisions in the UK.
  • Zooniverse – https://www.zooniverse.org/projects. Zooniverse is a citizen science web portal that currently hosts eight collective data applications which allows users to participate in scientific research. As of March 2012, the project has over 600,000 human volunteers, collectively referred to as Zooites. Two examples of Zooniverse projects include:
    • Galaxy Zoo – http://www.galaxyzoo.org. Launched in 2007, Galaxy Zoo has over 250,000 people helping with the classification of galaxies, providing more than 60,000,000 classifications. This work is entirely uncompensated.
    • Ancient Lives – http://ancientlives.org/. Users transcribe ancient Egyptian papyruses. The papyri belong to the Egypt Exploration Society and their texts will eventually be published and numbered in Society's Greco-Roman Memoirs series.
  • Vertices – http://www2.vertices.com/home/. This firm specializes in community participatory mapping and has a few examples on their website on projects they have done with various communities, capturing things from walking routes to healthy restaurants. In these examples the community collected data using a variety of participants, from school kids to an identified task force. Additionally they have an interactive mapping tool called Mappler (http://www.mappler.com/) which provides the ability for users to go out and collect a variety of information and interactively map the information. One example they have is creating a road safety assessment.