Recently, the popularity of crowdsourcing has brought a new opportunity to engage human intelligence into various data analysis tasks. Compared with computer systems, crowds are good at handling items with human-intrinsic values or features. Existing approaches develop sophisticated methods by utilizing the crowd as a new type of processor, a.k.a. HPU (Human Processing Unit). As a consequence, tasks executed on HPU are called HPU-based tasks. Now we are in the Big Data Era, a nature question arises: How about crowdsourcing over Big Data, are we there yet?

In this talk, I will first briefly review the history of crowdsourcing and discuss the key issues related to crowdsourcing. Then, I will demonstrate the power of crowdsourcing in solving the well-known and very hard data integration problem, schema matching, and discuss how to migrate the power of crowdsourcing to a social media platform whose users can serve as a huge reservoir of workers. Finally, I will highlight some research challenges about crowdsourcing over Big Data.

Lei Chen received the BS degree in computer science and engineering from Tianjin University, Tianjin, China, in 1994, the MA degree from Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand, in 1997, and the PhD degree in computer science from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 2005. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests include crowdsourcing on social media, social media analysis, probabilistic and uncertain databases, and privacy-preserved data publishing. So far, he published nearly 200 conference and journal papers. He got the best paper awards in DASFAA 2009 and 2010. He is PC Track chairs for SIGMOD 2014, VLDB 2014, ICDE 2012, CIKM 2012, SIGMM 2011. He has served as PC members for SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, SIGMM, and WWW. Currently, he serves as an associate editor for IEEE Transaction on Data and Knowledge Engineering and Distribute and Parallel Databases. He is a member of the ACM and the chairman of ACM Hong Kong Chapter and ACM SIGMOD China Chapter.