Answering planning queries with the crowd
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
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Recent research has shown that crowd sourcing can be used effectively to solve problems that are difficult for computers, e.g., optical character recognition and identification of the structural configuration of natural proteins [1]. In this demo we propose to use the power of the crowd to address yet another difficult problem that frequently occurs in a daily life-planning a sequence of actions, when the goal is hard to formalize. For example, planning the sequence of places/attractions to visit in the course of a vacation, where the goal is to enjoy the resulting vacation the most, or planning the sequence of courses to take in an academic schedule planning, where the goal is to obtain solid knowledge of a given subject domain. Such goals may be easily understandable by humans, but hard or even impossible to formalize for a computer. We present a novel algorithm for efficiently harnessing the crowd to assist in solving such planning problems. The algorithm builds the desired plans incrementally, optimally choosing at each step the ‘best’ questions so that the overall number of questions that need to be asked is minimized. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution in CrowdPlanr, a system for vacation travel planning. Given a destination, dates, preferred activities and other constraints CrowdPlanr employs the crowd to build a vacation plan (sequence of places to visit) that is expected to maximize the “enjoyment” of the vacation.