Newswise: Researchers Use Crowdsourcing to Speed Up Data Analysis in Corn Plants

Newswise: Researchers Use Crowdsourcing to Speed Up Data Analysis in Corn Plants. “Teaching a machine to finish a complex task can save humans a lot of time, effort and money. But first, the machine has to learn how, and that comes with plenty of its own challenges. An interdisciplinary team of Iowa State University scientists turned to crowdsourcing, or relying on large groups of minimally trained people, to repeat a task often enough that researchers could formulate an algorithm that allows a computer to carry out that task automatically. In this case, the scientists wanted to teach a machine to identify the tassels of corn plants when given a vast number of photographic images to sort through.”