Do machines work better than humans? You can find out by helping research!

The 1709 Blog has heard about an interesting research project on automated notice-and-takedown currently being undertaken at the University of Southampton by PhD student Pei Zhang.

Pei is now looking for volunteers to validate her conclusions.

Here's what Pei writes: 

"I am a PhD student in Computer Science at University of Southampton. I am doing an interdisciplinary research on how technologies can help verify copyright infringing activity on web pages in the context of notice-and-take-down procedures. 

I need 4~6 legal experts with a good working knowledge of intellectual property law for the evaluation phase of my system. You are thus invited to take part in a simple experiment which will help to refine my system. 

For a more detailed description of my research see the recent paper I presented at WebSci16’ Conference in May.

The experiment takes around 1.5~2 hours. 

During this experiment, each expert will be given 15 webpages and key information about copyright works that may be accessible through these webpages. Based on your knowledge and understanding, you are expected to give ratings of how likely you think there is a copyright infringement on each webpage and then to fill in a Questionnaire to explain the reasons for your rating. The experiment is carried out anonymously.

You will receive a £40 Amazon voucher and a huge thank you for your time and efforts!

Please email me asap at pz2g12@soton.ac.uk with a short bio (or a link to a short bio) if you have a bit of spare time before the end of September!"