AI for Good Global Summit - COVID-19: Combining crowdsourcing and AI to tackle the Pandemic

Crowdsourcing is often associated with the darker side of AI: clickworkers in sweatshops filtering out illegal content from social media sites, to help train bots that will ultimately make the clickworkers redundant. In this session, we look at some of the more positive synergies between AI and crowdsourcing, through the lens of the coronavirus pandemic. Online crowdsourced events such as the EUvsVirus hackathon held in April with over 20,000 participants have proliferated under the current global lockdown, bringing with them new lessons for how AI can contribute to better organizing large scale collaborations between humans. At the scale of citizen-driven science for Covid, projects have emerged that combine AI and crowdsourcing to extract vital information from the flood of literature being produced or train algorithms that can analyse social media for important trends. As the EC launches a new initiative for grassroots crowdsourcing to tackle the SDGs, this panel will discuss how AI can help crowds achieve more, how crowds can help improve AI, and where this marriage of people and machines might have the most impact on Covid-related research and innovation.