Colloquium April 22: Seth Cooper, Northeastern

Friday, April 22

2:35pm in Wege

Crowdsourcing with Video Games
People and computers working together can solve problems neither could solve alone. To support this, video games provide a compelling approach: they are a natural space for problem solving and can foster the engagement necessary for people to make a contribution.  Games have been used in this way to crowdsource approaches to protein design, software verification, and activity recognition. In this talk I will discuss a variety of approaches to making games that crowdsource the solution to problems, using image classification as a common application.
Seth Cooper is an Assistant Professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University.  He was previously Creative Director of the Center for Game Science at the University of Washington, where he also earned his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering.  Seth’s work focuses on using video games to crowdsource the solutions to difficult real world problems.  He is co-creator of Foldit, a video game that has allowed hundreds of thousands of players to be involved in scientific research in biochemistry.