Not just screwing workers, but also robots who manage the work of the organizers – informs “New Scientist.” As many people believe, robots take jobs away from people. However, a newly developed virtual robot- the organizer may commission the work, looking for the right ones “human resources”. Suggestbot is the work of Dan Cosley's team at Cornell University in Ithaca. It's supposed to help online communities, such as editors of Wikipedia or the Slashdot web science and technology blog. Members of such communities add and edit new texts, but what with time, when new tasks appear all the time, it gets more and more difficult.
Suggestbot can link tasks to the interests of individuals. For example, it searches Wikipedia for terms that need to be refined and compares them with a list of previously edited articles or user profiles.
To check, how Suggestbot improves your productivity, Cosley was researching the work 91 Wikipedia editors, taking together 3094 tasks.
Three versions of Suggestbot's algorithm were tried – one compared the titles of articles requiring extension with the editor's previous achievements, the other connected individuals to themes, which were popular with editors with a similar past, the third looked for links between articles in need of expansion and those in the editor's profile. The results were compared with the random allocation of topics.
After two weeks it turned out, that a random choice led to editing from 3,4 do 4,3 times smaller number of texts than when using the robot.
Robot-work organizer
