1. Bossa: A platform for distributed thinking David P. Anderson UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab 11 Oct 2007

2. Distributed thinking projects ● Image pattern recognition – Stardust@home – Clickworkers – GalaxyZoo.org – Mars@home? – Lucy@home? – Africa UNOSAT project? ● Image tagging: ESP game ● Rosetta@play ● OpenMind.org – various AI tasks

3. Bossa: a back end for DT projects ● Uses BOINC Basics ● Front ends – web-based: Stardust – plugin-based: Flash, Silverlight – separate app ● Like Amazon Mechanical Turk, but open

4. Task properties ● Duration – single web page – offline, use separate apps ● Plurality – single user vs. group ● Validation – algorithmic – via redundancy

5. Abstractions ● Skill apps – type – min skill/knowledge level – max instances per user/group – timeout ● Skill tasks – start/finish page URL – credit – calibration tasks ● Task instances – user/group

6. Dynamic skill estimation ● Bolt course – mandatory review ● Calibration tasks ● Redundancy checking

7. Implementation ● Task assignment – PHP page or function ● Task completion – PHP API ● Task submission – PHP API ● Timeout daemon ● Validation/assimilation daemon ● Miscellaneous – pending/completed tasks – leaderboards etc.

8. Multi-level workflows App 1 min skill = 0.2 App 2 min skill = 0.5 App 3 min skill = 0.8