Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Clay Shirky. New York, NY: Penguin, 2010. 242 pages, $25.95 pbk. It sometimes seems that the hardest thing to do in the Information Age is to communicate. In the rush of easily accessible data and the maelstrom of conflicting viewpoints, two otherwise intelligent people can talk past one another as they stake out territory with the tenacity of computer viruses. NYU professor Clay Shirky and media critic Nicholas Carr have been squaring off now for two years over what impact the Internet is having on our society. Shirky takes the more optimistic viewpoint, Carr the more pessimistic. Carr threw down the gauntlet with his 2008 Atlantic cover article "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" and has continued the debate with his recent book The Shallows. Shirky provides a response in Cognitive Surplus, but criticizes skeptics like Carr only obliquely. Shirky says their main frustration is with the profusion of choice: "Scarcity," he says, "is easier to deal with than abundance." But this book doesn't dwell much on the naysayers. Instead, it frames the subject of the Internet with a bold and startling vision about its potential. "Imagine," he says, "treating the free time of the world's educated citizenry as an aggregate, a kind of cognitive surplus." We've not always used that surplus wisely. Shirky's case in point is television, and how it has come to dominate our culture. Over much of the planet, Shirky writes, "the three most common activities are . . . work, sleep, and watching TV." Like gin in early-eighteenth-century London, twentieth-century television is one of those social habits that critics have denounced and tried hard to minimize, but without success. There are signs now, however, that TV viewing - still thoroughly popular - isn't quite the juggernaut it used to be. Young people are increasingly turning to the Internet; and the Web, it turns out, allows humans to do things they can't do with other media - namely, create, produce, and connect. Instead of devoting twenty passive hours a week to the tube (the international average), people now use a medium that lets them make and share things. That may seem trivial, considering the amount of silly, offensive, or deceptive fare on the Web, but think of it this way: Which do you think contains more enduring cultural, intellectual, and societal value - posting comments on a blog or watching Gitligan's Island! The Internet is no utopia, but neither are older media. In fact, some of them may be a good deal less salutary. Take, for example, the online fantasy game World of Warcraft. As Shirky puts it in a tart retort: "However pathetic you may think it is to sit in your basement pretending to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience: it's worse to sit in your basement trying to decide whether Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter." There's a wide variety of content on the Internet, of course - the widest in any medium - and the largest number of producers of content: a colossal and revolutionary force. The "hundred million hours of cumulative thought" it took to produce Wikipedia is one example of Shirky's "cognitive surplus," and while it still pales before the "two hundred billion hours of TV every year," you can readily see the potential. …

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

Queuing delay is an essential topic in the design of quantum networks. This paper introduces a tractable model for analyzing the queuing delay of quantum data, referred to as quantum queuing delay (QQD). The model employs a dynamic programming formalism and accounts for practical aspects such as the finite memory size. Using this model, we develop a cognitive-memory-based policy for memory management and show that this policy can decrease the average queuing delay exponentially with respect to memory size. Such a significant reduction can be traced back to the use of entanglement, a peculiar quantum phenomenon that has no classical counterpart. Numerical results validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the near-optimal performance of the developed policy.

Quantum Queuing Delay

[Context] Freelancers could catalyze the software development process by providing their niche skills to generate high quality outputs. They could help companies (including startups) to foster innovations by suggesting creative ideas and providing their expertise in implementing them (for instance, designing solutions, coding solutions etc.). Freelancers could effectively and efficiently work as a virtual member of the software development team. The company must make informed decisions about which task to allot to the freelancer, which freelancer to select, pricing the task, and evaluating the submitted work. On the other hand, the freelancer should make an informed decision about evaluating the monetary value of the task to be charged, trusting the requester, analyzing the skills requirement of the task (finding matches between skill requirement and skills processed), selecting the best task, and maintaining the highest level of reputation. However, the literature does not provide freelancers and the companies the guidelines that support their decision making. However, if freelancers are selected carefully for the most suitable task, the companies will benefit a lot in terms of improved software development metrics. [Objectives] The objective of this paper is to provide the research community the research trends in freelancer-supported software development. This helps to understand that which software development areas have higher concentrations of research efforts, which area has the support of empirical evidence to support management decision makings, and which area requires the research attention. [Method] The systematic study is conducted by planning the mapping protocol, executing the protocol, and reporting the findings using various visualization tools like bar charts and pie charts. The search process was planned to be executed using set of inclusion and exclusion conditions on four bibliographic databases (IEEExplore, Springerlink, Sciencedirect, and ACM digital library). The relevant papers are selected by applying inclusion and exclusion conditions. The google citations of the relevant papers are subject to the inclusion and exclusion conditions again to include the more relevant papers. Finally, the systematic schema was created and populated after analyzing the studies abstracts. [Results] The results indicate the following (a) The research focus is on generic software development (78%) rather on individual life cycle activities. (b) The number of empirical studies is limited (25%). (c) A number of studies proposing solutions and evaluating on live cases in industrial settings are missing from the literature. This is in comparison to the validation approaches (72%) i.e., solutions tested in laboratory settings. (d) At present, the literature has limited ability to provide the software companies (including startups) with the guidelines (in the form of opinions and experience reports) for involving freelancers in the software development process. (e) The reported challenges include Collaboration and Coordination (33%), Developer Recommendation (or selection) (19%), Team Formulation (14%), Task Recommendation (allocation) (14%), Task Decomposition (11%), Privacy and Security (Confidentiality) (11%), Budget Estimation (8%), Recognition (8%), Trust Issues (8%), Market Dynamism (6%), Intellectual Property Issues (6%), Participation of Crowd Worker (6%), and Capacity Utilization (3%). These challenges are highly interactive, and each challenge impacts all other challenges. (e) Recent focus of the researchers (total 7 studies in 2019) is on generic software development handling the collaboration and coordination (3 studies out of 7), Developer recommendation (2 studies out of 7), and task recommendation (2 studies out of 7). [Conclusion] The freelancer-driven software engineering research area has got the attraction of the researchers, but it will take a long time to gain maturity. This puts an urgent call for more empirical studies and evaluation-based solution research that could help companies (including startups) to foster innovations. Further, the research focus should be well distributed among the various development phases to address the unique challenges associated with individual activities. The accurate management of the freelancer in the software development could help companies and startups to foster innovations and remain competitive in the marketplace.

Freelancers in the Software Development Process: A Systematic Mapping Study

We consider a setting where a stream of qubits is processed sequentially. We derive fundamental limits on the rate at which classical information can be transmitted using qubits that decohere as they wait to be processed. Specifically, we model the sequential processing of qubits using a single server queue, and derive expressions for the classical capacity of such a quantum `queue-channel.' Focusing on two important noise models, namely the erasure channel and the depolarizing channel, we obtain explicit single-letter capacity formulas in terms of the stationary waiting time of qubits in the queue. Our capacity proof also implies that a `classical' coding/decoding strategy is optimal, i.e., an encoder which uses only orthogonal product states, and a decoder which measures in a fixed product basis, are sufficient to achieve the classical capacity of both queue-channels. Our proof technique for the converse theorem generalizes readily -- in particular, whenever the underlying quantum noise channel is additive, we can obtain a single-letter upper bound on the classical capacity of the corresponding quantum queue-channel. More broadly, our work begins to quantitatively address the impact of decoherence on the performance limits of quantum information processing systems.

The Classical Capacity of Additive Quantum Queue-Channels

We consider a setting where a stream of qubits is processed sequentially. We derive fundamental limits on the rate at which classical information can be transmitted using qubits that decohere as they wait to be processed. Specifically, we model the sequential processing of qubits using a single server queue, and derive expressions for the classical capacity of such a quantum ‘queue-channel.’ Focusing on quantum erasures, we obtain an explicit single-letter capacity formula in terms of the stationary waiting time of qubits in the queue. Our capacity proof also implies that a ‘classical’ coding/decoding strategy is optimal, i.e., an encoder which uses only orthogonal product states, and a decoder which measures in a fixed product basis, are sufficient to achieve the classical capacity of the quantum erasure queue-channel. More broadly, our work begins to quantitatively address the impact of decoherence on the performance limits of quantum information processing systems.

The Classical Capacity of a Quantum Erasure Queue-Channel

We consider a setting where qubits are processed sequentially, and derive fundamental limits on the rate at which classical information can be transmitted using quantum states that decohere in time. Specifically, we model the sequential processing of qubits using a single server queue, and derive explicit expressions for the capacity of such a ‘queue-channel.’ We also demonstrate a sweet-spot phenomenon with respect to the arrival rate to the queue, i.e., we show that there exists a value of the arrival rate of the qubits at which the rate of information transmission (in bits/sec) through the queue-channel is maximised. Next, we consider a setting where the average rate of processing qubits is fixed, and show that the capacity of the queue-channel is maximised when the processing time is deterministic. We also discuss design implications of these results on quantum information processing systems.

Qubits through Queues: The Capacity of Channels with Waiting Time Dependent Errors

Crowdsourcing of jobs to online freelance platforms is rapidly gaining popularity. Most crowdsourcing platforms are uncontrolled and offer freedom to customers and freelancers to choose each other. This works well for unskilled jobs (e.g., image classification) with no specific quality requirement since freelancers are functionally identical. For skilled jobs (e.g., software development) with specific quality requirements, however, this does not ensure that the maximum number of job requests is satisfied. In this paper, we determine the capacity of regulated freelance systems, in terms of maximum satisfied job requests, and propose centralized schemes that achieve capacity. To ensure decentralized operation and freedom for customers and freelancers, we propose simple schemes compatible with the operation of current crowdsourcing platforms that approximately achieve capacity. Furthermore, for settings where the number of job requests exceeds capacity, we propose a scheme that is agnostic of that information, but is optimal and fair in declining jobs without wait.

Work Capacity of Regulated Freelance Platforms: Fundamental Limits and Decentralized Schemes

We consider a setting where a stream of qubits is processed sequentially. We derive fundamental limits on the rate at which classical information can be transmitted using qubits that decohere as they wait to be processed. Specifically, we model the sequential processing of qubits using a single server queue, and derive expressions for the classical capacity of such a quantum ‘queue-channel.’ Focusing on two important noise models, namely the erasure channel and the depolarizing channel , we obtain explicit single-letter capacity formulas in terms of the stationary waiting time of qubits in the queue. Our capacity proof also implies that a ‘classical’ coding/decoding strategy is optimal, i.e., an encoder which uses only orthogonal product states, and a decoder which measures in a fixed product basis, are sufficient to achieve the classical capacity of both queue-channels. Our proof technique for the converse theorem generalizes readily — in particular, whenever the underlying quantum noise channel is additive , we can obtain a single-letter upper bound on the classical capacity of the corresponding quantum queue-channel. More broadly, our work begins to quantitatively address the impact of decoherence on the performance limits of quantum information processing systems.

Consider the information-theoretic limits of reliable communication in a multiuser setting of transmission through a system with queue-length dependent service quality. Multiple transmitters dispatch encoded symbols using renewal processes over a system that is a superposition of $GI_{k}/GI/1$ queues, and a noisy server processes symbols in order of arrival with error probability depending on the queue-length. First, the information capacities of the single-user and multiuser continuous-time queue-length dependent system are found. When the number of transmitters is large and each is sparse, the superposition of arrivals approaches a Poisson point process. In characterizing the Poisson approximation, we show that the individual and sum capacities of the multiuser system converges to the capacity of a single-user $M/GI/1$ queue-length dependent system. The speed of convergence in the number of users is explicitly given. Further, the best and worst server behaviors of $M$ / G $I$ /1 queues from the single-user case are preserved in the multiuser case.

Avhishek Chatterjee

Papers

Qubits through Queues: The Capacity of Channels with Waiting Time Dependent Errors

The Classical Capacity of Additive Quantum Queue-Channels

Work Capacity of Regulated Freelance Platforms: Fundamental Limits and Decentralized Schemes

The Classical Capacity of Additive Quantum Queue-Channels

On Multiuser Systems with Queue-Length Dependent Service Quality