Human computation is a new research area that studies the process of channeling the vast internet population to perform tasks or provide data towards solving difficult problems that no known computer algorithms can yet solve perfectly and efficiently, e.g. digitize books, recognize objects in images and songs, translate sentences, summarize news articles, annotate videos etc. The goal of HCOMP 2009 is to bring together academic and industry researchers in a stimulating discussion of existing human computation applications, such as Games With A Purpose (e.g. the ESP game), Mechanical Turk and CAPTCHAs, and future directions of this new subject area.

Included in the workshop are invited talks, presentations, posters, and a demo session where participants are invited to showcase their human computation applications.