title: Crowdsourcing the unknown: the satellite search for Genghis Khan.
abstract: Massively parallel collaboration and emergent knowledge generation is described through a large scale survey for archaeological anomalies within ultra-high resolution earth-sensing satellite imagery. Over 10K online volunteers contributed 30K hours (3.4 years), examined 6,000 km², and generated 2.3 million feature categorizations. Motivated by the search for Genghis Khan's tomb, participants were tasked with finding an archaeological enigma that lacks any historical description of its potential visual appearance. Without a pre-existing reference for validation we turn towards consensus, defined by kernel density estimation, to pool human perception for "out of the ordinary" features across a vast landscape. This consensus served as the training mechanism within a self-evolving feedback loop between a participant and the crowd, essential driving a collective reasoning engine for anomaly detection. The resulting map led a National Geographic expedition to confirm 55 archaeological sites across a vast landscape. A increased ground-truthed accuracy was observed in those participants exposed to the peer feedback loop over those whom worked in isolation, suggesting collective reasoning can emerge within networked groups to outperform the aggregate independent ability of individuals to define the unknown.
authors.affiliation: California Institute For Telecommunications and Information Technology, University of California San Diego, San Diego, California, United States of America.
authors.forename: A Y M
authors.initials: AY
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.affiliation: California Institute For Telecommunications and Information Technology, University of California San Diego, San Diego, California, United States of America.
authors.forename: Albert Yu-Min
authors.initials: AY
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.affiliation: Computer Science and Engineering Dept., University of California San Diego, San Diego, California, United States of America.
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Huynh
authors.affiliation: Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept., University of California San Diego, San Diego, California, United States of America.
authors.forename: Gert
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Lanckriet
authors.affiliation: Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept., University of California San Diego, San Diego, California, United States of America.
authors.forename: Luke
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Barrington
mesh_terms: D001106:Archaeology / Q000379:methods*; D063045:Crowdsourcing; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D063809:Satellite Imagery