Humans Plus Computers Equals Better Crowdsourcing

By Karen Weise

Miller Mobley for Bloomberg Businessweek

If computer scientist Panagiotis Ipeirotis were to write a profile of himself, he’d start by hiring people online to summarize the key concepts in his published papers. Then he’d write a program to download every word in his 187 blog entries and examine which posts visitors to the site read most. Ipeirotis, an associate professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, would do all that because his research shows that pairing computer and human intelligence can unearth discoveries neither can find alone. Ipeirotis, 35, is an expert on crowdsourcing, a way to break down big projects into small tasks that many people perform online. He tries to find ways, as he puts it, of using computer databases to augment human inputs.

Ipeirotis describes a recent real-world success with Magnum Photos. The renowned photo agency had hundreds of thousands of images scanned into its digital archive that it couldn’t search because they weren’t tagged with keywords. So Magnum hired Tagasauris, a startup Ipeirotis co-founded, to begin annotating. As Tagasauris’s online workers typed in tags, its analytical software queried databases to make the descriptions more specific. For example, when workers tagged a photo with the word “chicken,” the software tried to clarify whether the worker meant the feathery animal, the raw meat, or the death-defying game.

The system also links different photos from one roll of film, since one image provides only a slice of potential context. Noticing that workers had tagged images of George Lucas, Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, and Mackenzie Phillips in separate photos from one shoot, the system again dove into databases to see what those people had in common. One answer came up: the film American Graffiti. Tagasauris found nearly two dozen previously lost photos taken on the film’s set. “Computers couldn’t ID humans in the photo,” Iperiotis says, “but humans couldn’t know the context.”

Ipeirotis has been tinkering with computers since he was a kid growing up in his native Greece. In college he had a tech-support gig where he’d help customers figure out what was wrong with their PCs by scouring computer companies’ websites. (This was pre-Google.) He realized there had to be a way to get these customers and these websites to speak the same language—and has pondered human-machine cooperation ever since. Ipeirotis says some big tech companies have asked him to improve their crowdsourcing efforts. (He won’t name names.) Ultimately, his goal is getting technology to help people do more meaningful work. “People are much better at jobs that require them to think, rather than mindless tasks,” he says.

Started programming computer games as a child

PhD in computer science, Columbia University

Using tech to find long-lost photos from American Graffiti

Weise is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek.

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Fix This/Transportation

Keeping people and goods moving is complicated by aging infrastructure, sprawling cities, and shrinking budgets. How do we rethink transportation for the 21st century?

How do we fix our education problems?

Expensive gasoline, lost jobs, hobbled industries, and climate change. How do we fix our energy problems?

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AIDS Grove Provokes Bulldozer Threat; Chicago Serial Killer: TV

December 02, 2011, 1:54 AM EST By Greg Evans

Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) -- The winning design for the National AIDS Memorial featured a small grouping of blackened poles erected on a charred landscape.

The proposal by architects Chloe Town and Janette Kim was meant to evoke the devastation of a forest fire. Supporters saw a poignant metaphor, while detractors considered it a pretentious waste of time and money.

“The Grove,” a terrific hour-long documentary by Andy Abrahams Wilson and Tom Shepard, traces the little-known, two- decade history of San Francisco’s National AIDS Memorial Grove. Beginning tonight, the film will air on PBS stations to mark World Aids Day.

In 1991, a group of grieving San Franciscans planted a few trees in a neglected, seven-acre section of Golden Gate Park to commemorate the AIDS deaths of friends and lovers.

Soon, as many as 200 volunteers set aside the third Saturday of every month for weeding and planting, and the once blighted spot became a beautiful, low-key sanctuary. In 1996, local congresswoman Nancy Pelosi successfully urged President Bill Clinton to designate the Grove as a national memorial.

Bulldozer Threat

That resulted in more internal dissent than widespread recognition. Meetings of the Grove’s board of directors, captured by Wilson’s camera, became polite but intense battlegrounds, with younger members bemoaning the park’s “disconnect” between its low profile and national aspirations.

The park, says one board member, lacks the “shocking, disruptive” statement demanded by the AIDS crisis.

“For me, a lovely garden doesn’t do it,” says another.

A lovely garden, of course, is exactly what founding board member Jack Porter had in mind when he organized the first planting. He threatens to “throw himself in front of the bulldozer” if even one of the winning design’s charred poles is installed.

Porter’s side wins that battle, and the patch of greenery remains a memorial without a monument. Giving both sides their due, “The Grove” offers no easy answers on how best to memorialize the dead. But the film’s gentle, insightful approach is a fine place to start.

“The Grove” airs on PBS stations beginning tonight. Check local listings. Rating: ***

‘Hidden City’

The best stories, says crime novelist Marcus Sakey, are about the worst people.

That’s the premise for Sakey’s new Travel Channel series “Hidden City.” Visiting a different place each week, Sakey presents a travelogue of crime and notoriety, recounting the darker moments that helped shape the place.

With his double-pierced ears and shaggy hair, Sakey is an affable guide prone to neo-noir narration (Chicago is a city “good at doing bad.”) But his tales are anything but hidden.

In the Chicago episode that kicks off the series, Sakey rehashes the tale of H.H. Holmes, whose murder spree during the 1893 World’s Fair was definitively chronicled in Erik Larson’s best-seller “The Devil in the White City.”

Segments on John Dillinger and 1968’s Chicago Seven trial turn up nothing a Wikipedia search couldn’t reveal.

To fill out the running time, Sakey wanders off track with silly diversions. In the segment about the ‘68 riots, he trots out that hoary reporter’s gimmick of undergoing a voluntary dousing of pepper spray. To better understand Dillinger, he fires off a tommy gun at a shooting range.

The second episode available for review focuses on Boston, and finds nothing new in the Brink’s Robbery, the Strangler or James “Whitey” Bulger.

Sakey might have been wiser to present his trips alphabetically. Maybe future installments on Austin and Anchorage will contain a few surprises.

“Hidden City” airs Tuesday on Travel Channel at 10 p.m. New York time. Rating: **

(Greg Evans is a critic for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed are his own.)

--Editors: Rick Warner, Jeremy Gerard.

To contact the writer on the story: Greg Evans at gregeaevans@yahoo.com.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff in New York at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.

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Walk, Bike to Work in Salt Lake’s Answer to Suburban Nightmares

December 05, 2011, 7:54 AM EST By James S. Russell

Dec. 5 (Bloomberg) -- At the southwestern edge of Salt Lake City, tightly packed new homes run along gentle ridgelines. In the background, the snow-covered Wasatch Mountains catch puffs of cloud on a crisp autumn day.

This is the growing community of Daybreak and it’s much more than suburbia in a stunning setting. Someday residents of 20,000 houses and apartments could walk or bike to 2.4 million square feet of shopping and 5 million square feet of offices.

The same mix of uses and walkability can be found in City Creek, an estimated $1.5 billion redevelopment covering 23 acres in downtown Salt Lake City, about 45 minutes away.

The Salt Lake City area is piloting a federal program called Sustainable Communities that could help cities uncover underserved markets and devise developments that serve them. Shaun Donovan, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, worked on the program with Lisa Jackson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and Ray LaHood, who heads the Department of Transportation.

“More metro areas understand that they need a variety of places for people to live,” Donovan said in an interview in his Washington office. “Or they will end up shutting out whole classes of working people, like teachers, and firefighters. That makes it harder to attract employers.”

The hope is that communities can move beyond the brain-dead national models of development and related finance that led to bubble-fed overbuilding. Even now few developers know how to pump out anything but oversized tract houses and identical shopping strips.

‘Ghost Towns’

“The ghost towns of the housing bust are places that lack transportation options, that aren’t walkable,” Donovan said. “The average family spends 52 cents of every dollar they earn on housing and transportation combined, so the biggest opportunity is in development around transportation.”

Providing the link between City Creek, which opens in March, and Daybreak is a light rail line that started operations last August.

Daybreak and City Creek got built in sync with a regional planning effort of 18 communities and four counties along the Wasatch Front called Wasatch Choice for 2040.

Most real-estate developers and their lenders wouldn’t attempt the density and mix of the Salt Lake City projects. Neither City Creek Reserve Inc., the development arm of the Mormon church, nor Daybreak’s developer, Kennecott Land Co., which is part of the Rio Tinto mining empire, needed conventional lenders.

Getting Comfortable

Sustainable Communities aims at promoting smaller mixed- use, high-density development around transit stops. The federal grant is only $5 million, and local planners are using it to help lenders and developers get comfortable with the market for this so-called transit-oriented development. They may change zoning and parking requirements to lower the barriers to entry.

Planners use computer modeling to test transit-oriented neighborhood-design scenarios, trying out different mixes and densities of apartments, offices, shops, schools and parks. The models evaluate the effects “on transportation, utility costs, tax revenue, and on return on investment for developers,” said Andrew Gruber, executive director of the Wasatch Front Regional Council, a local-government group that co-manages Wasatch Choice for 2040.

‘Some Kind of Leap’

“Communities recognize there’s some kind of leap they have to take,” said Donovan, so that everyone learns what specific kinds of development are likely to work in the future. It’s an effort cities almost never attempt.

If Wasatch 2040’s planning tools help reduce development risks, projects can more adventurously pursue amenable growth that saves energy, lowers government costs and eradicates a minimum of farmland and forest.

It’s regrettable that Congress has just eliminated the program’s funding for 2012, even though the $98 million it cost this year is meaningless in deficit-reduction terms.

“The reason this effort has gotten so much interest at the state and local level is that we are supporting a vision, rather than imposing a vision,” Donovan said.

(James S. Russell writes on architecture for Muse, the arts and culture section of Bloomberg News. Island Press has just published his book, “The Agile City.” The opinions expressed are his own.)

--Editors: Jeffrey Burke, Lili Rosboch.

To contact the writer of this column: James S. Russell in New York at jamesrussell@earthlink.net; web.me.com/jscanlonrussell

To contact the editor responsible for this column: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.

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Toby Keith, Mezcal Endorsement Pioneer

Keith says he fell in love with mezcal when he was on the road and would cross the Mexican border Rick Diamond/Wireimage/Getty Images; Judith Collins/Alamy

By Kent Black

I’ve been hit with wine; I’ve been hit with vodka, hit with tequila, and I’ve been hit with whiskey,” says country music star Toby Keith of the various liquor endorsement opportunities that have come his way. “All the whiskey’s already spoken for?…?and everyone’s got a vodka, and one of my buddies does tequila.?…?[But] there was no one doing mezcal.”

There’s no doubting Keith’s horse sense. In the six months since he released Wild Shot, it has become the best-selling premium mezcal in the U.S. Shot and a Beer, Keith’s business venture, has sold 10,000 Wild Shot cases this year, says Vincent Viola, Keith’s partner in the company and its president. The pair hope to sell 100,000 cases a year by 2015. Keith has the advantage of being able to sell the hooch at his 11 I Love This Bar & Grill franchises, several of which are affiliated with Caesars/Harrah’s casinos.

While celebrity liquor ambassadors are nothing new, more and more stars are becoming actively involved in the enterprise they promote (at least according to the press releases). Marilyn Manson, an absinthe aficionado, worked for months with his partner testing recipes before coming up with Mansinthe. Rapper Ludacris reportedly studied cognac production in France to perfect his own brand, Conjure. But one gets the sense that for Keith, the appeal of mezcal lies more in its rising sales than in its distinctive smokiness. Although he frequently rhapsodizes about alcohol—“Whiskey for my men/ Beer for my horses,” he sings in his No. 1 country hit, a duet with Willie Nelson—mezcal figures in none of his recordings. In concerts he occasionally changes the lyrics to “mezcal for my horses,” but never does he sing about its being fit for human consumption.

Yet the Oklahoma entertainer says he fell in love with mezcal more than 25 years ago, when he was on the road and would cross the border into Mexico. Keith’s fond memories of mezcal triggered a light-bulb moment when he read about the spirit’s growing popularity in a magazine article.

Several artisanal mezcals such as Del Maguey, Los Amantes, Ilegal, and Los Nahuales have been winning awards and critical praise. In 2010 at the prestigious San Francisco World Spirits Competition, Del Maguey was judged Distiller of the Year in a field of 1,106 spirits from 61 countries. All liquor in Mexico made from the maguey, or agave, plant is mezcal. Tequila is a type of mezcal. By law, tequila may be made only from blue agave; mezcal is distilled from two dozen other varieties.

Keith admits his research into the category wasn’t extensive, other than determining that it was underexploited. “I didn’t go down there,” he says. “They just sent me the bottles.” Viola provided Keith with several from Mexican distillers before the songwriter decided on La Perla. Keith isn’t certain of La Perla’s location. “I want to say [the distiller is] in the eastern part of Guadalajara.” (Close. It is in San Luis Potosi, just a hundred or so miles northeast.)

The marketing material on Wild Shot claims it is made from 100 percent green agave. “All good mezcals are made from green agave,” Keith says. Del Maguey’s founder, Ron Cooper, who lives half the year near Tlacolula, Oaxaca—Mexico’s mezcal capital—says flatly, “There is no such thing as green agave.” The most commonly used agave in the state of San Luis Potosi is Maguey salmiana, which is sometimes referred to as maguey verde, though rarely is it the sole ingredient in mezcal. The term “green agave,” however, appears to exist only in the vernacular of marketers, playing off the better-known blue agave that tequila is made from. Viola confirms this, but claims, “Anyone involved in the production of mezcal, when talking to gringos, refers to the maguey as green agave.”

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<em>Tintin</em>: Opening in Theaters Far from You

By Ronald Grover and Michael White

By the time director Steven Spielberg walks the red carpet on Dec. 11 for the New York premiere of his animated movie The Adventures of Tintin, the film about a boy reporter in search of sunken treasure will already have sold well over $200 million in tickets—all far from the U.S. Tintin, featuring Jamie Bell and Daniel Craig, is based on the graphic novels by Belgian author and illustrator Georges Remi, better known as Herge. The film opened first in Europe in late October, then, three weeks later, in Asia. When U.S. audiences get their first peek at Tintin and his fox terrier Snowy on Dec. 21, the film will already have played in more than 50 countries, including France, Germany, China, Japan, and even tiny Estonia.

U.S. studios are simply following the money. This year, moviegoers in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia will spend a combined $21 billion on movie tickets, nearly twice as much as the $12.2 billion spent in the U.S. and Canada, according to consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers. Box-office sales in some big emerging economies will grow by double digits annually through 2015, PwC predicts. “There’s tremendous expansion going on outside the U.S., which is a pretty mature market,” says Jeff Blake, vice-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Tintin’s distributor in most overseas markets.

Tintin was a natural for a European opening. The character has been a favorite among children and adults alike there since his debut in 1929. The 24-volume series features the Boy Scout-like Tintin with his trademark cowlick unmasking evil thugs engaged in drug smuggling, gun running, and other dastardly activities amid sweeping historical backdrops such as the Russian Revolution or the eve of World War II. The books, translated into about 80 languages, have sold 350 million copies worldwide. In France, where the film opened during a 10-day school break in October around La Toussaint, or All Saints’ Day, Tintin so far has grossed more than $50 million.

Paramount Pictures’ Tom Cruise action film Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, will open in France, Germany, and Japan ahead of its Dec. 21 release in the U.S. Sony plans to release the James Bond thriller Skyfall in Europe next October, two weeks ahead of the U.S. debut. That will boost ticket sales during midterm school breaks in the U.K., France, and elsewhere, Blake says. “We keep a very large calendar of events all over the world,” says David Kosse, president of international distribution at Universal Pictures.

Hollywood is already raking in foreign cash. In April, Universal released its car-racing heist movie Fast Five in the U.K., Australia, and South Korea before its U.S. release in late April. It collected $626 million in worldwide ticket sales, $416 million of which came from outside the U.S., according to researcher Box Office Mojo.

Studios are jostling to beat rivals into overseas exhibition, one of the industry’s few growth segments. Universal rushed to release Fast Five ahead of Paramount’s Thor in several markets. That movie, about a hammer-swinging god, took in $267.5 million of its $448 million global haul from foreign sales, according to Box Office Mojo.

Box office receipts outside North America will grow at an 8.1 percent compound annual rate through 2015, says PwC, compared with a 6 percent forecast for the U.S. But some regions will see more robust increases, with Central and Eastern Europe logging 11.5 percent annual growth and Asia 11.3 percent. “What Hollywood sells, and the rest of the world wants, are great franchises, great stars, and superstar directors like Steven Spielberg,” says Vincent Bruzzese, president of market research firm Ipsos OTX’s worldwide motion picture group. “You no longer need the buzz of a large opening in the U.S. for a film to sell well overseas.”

The bottom line: The Adventures of Tintin, a film to be released in the U.S. at Christmas, has already logged $207 million in foreign ticket sales.

Grover covers the media and entertainment industry for Bloomberg Businessweek in Los Angeles. White is a reporter for Bloomberg News.

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Erin Morrow's MassMotion Simulates Crowds

Finn O'Hara for Bloomberg Businessweek

By Ashlee Vance

Over the past decade, Erin Morrow has become an expert on the movements of the masses. He’s a transportation planning consultant and focuses on helping architects understand how crowds will flow through the airports, hotels, and skyscrapers they dream up. Morrow predicts how many people will line up at Starbucks during commuter hours and determines where to place an escalator to minimize bottlenecks.

Morrow ’s analytical weapon is a software package he created called MassMotion. It takes 3D computer models of buildings and fills them with “agents,” virtual stick figures that represent people. These avatars aren’t mindless and in fact have specific personalities. Some meander. Others are busybodies in a rush. The agents will linger in front of signs and puzzle over directions, and they’ll also grab smokes together outside of exits. “They all have certain things they care about,” says Morrow.

While studying at the University of Waterloo, Morrow fancied himself a budding architect. Yet he dropped out and went to work at the Toronto office of Arup, a London-based design and engineering firm that specializes in large projects such as the Sydney Opera House and the Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing. Morrow, now 34, tapped into an innate understanding of geometry to begin advising colleagues on the layout of buildings. “I don’t know how to describe it,” he says. “I can just move things around in my head.”

Morrow began working with 3D software and taught himself to code. When Arup started work on New York’s Fulton Street Transit Center eight years ago, he decided to write a software application to add a layer of intelligence to the crowd animations typically done for this type of project. MassMotion was born, and Arup has since used it on projects including the JetBlue terminal in New York and Sydney’s metro system. In June, Arup’s software arm, Oasys, started licensing MassMotion for $34,000 a pop.

To create an accurate model, Morrow gathers data including how many people are expected to pass through the structure, the arrival and departure times for planes and trains, and the number of stores and reception desks. MassMotion assigns individual tasks to tens or even hundreds of thousands of agents—check in for a flight, for instance, or buy a cup of coffee—and sets them loose. “We give them a range of walking speeds, body sizes, and preferences for, say, avoiding escalators,” Morrow says. One simulation for Union Station in Toronto predicted that a particular concourse would clog up as people got off their trains. “There were a few exit passages, but they led to a downstream choke point where people would end up waiting for about seven minutes to exit,” Morrow says. The architects added relief corridors and alternative routes. “It’s always interesting to see what the agents will end up doing,” Morrow says. “Their behavior will highlight issues that you would not have otherwise considered.”

The simulations aren’t just for architects: Building managers have used MassMotion to predict how evacuations will unfold, and the forecasts are generally within a minute or so of actual times. Police use the software to predict how crowds might disperse from venues. And concert promoters are trying to gauge the movements of showgoers at large festivals—which suggests Morrow may need to develop algorithms for drunken avatars.

During vacations, Morrow finds himself viewing cities in different ways as a result of this work. He was at first confounded by the chaotic roads of Italy, where traffic signs and rules are routinely disobeyed. He realized drivers pay close attention to cars directly in front of them, even while ignoring everything else. “It looks like madness, but it works as long as everyone does it,” Morrow says. “I like trying to figure out what makes these systems tick.”

Applied a knack for geometry to advising architects after dropping out of the University of Waterloo.

MassMotion, crowd simulation software for building designers, went on sale in June for $34,000.

Morrow’s intelligent avatars help identify passageway choke points and predict evacuation times.

Vance is a technology writer for Bloomberg Businessweek.

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