What is AutoMan?

AutoMan is the first fully automatic crowdprogramming system. AutoMan integrates human-based ("crowdsourced") computations into a standard programming language as ordinary function calls that can be intermixed freely with traditional functions. This abstraction lets programmers focus on their programming logic.

An AutoMan program specifies a confidence level for the overall computation and a budget. The AutoMan runtime system then transparently manages all details necessary for scheduling, pricing, and quality control. AutoMan automatically schedules human tasks for each computation until it achieves the desired confidence level; monitors, reprices, and restarts human tasks as necessary; and maximizes parallelism across human workers while staying under budget.

AutoMan is available as a library for Scala.

Where did it all come from?

AutoMan is being actively developed by Daniel Barowy at Williams College and Emery Berger at the PLASMA Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Portions of AutoMan were developed as a collaboration with researchers at Microsoft Research NYC.