>since a lot of great research (at various universities, including MIT) is now a lot easier due to easily available human task workers This is very true. A lot

>since a lot of great research (at various universities, including MIT) is now a lot easier due to easily available human task workers This is very true. A lot of researchers today are using MobileWorks and other crowdsourcing platforms. It has a lot of implication in a number of research areas including AI, HCI, Databases, Bio-sciences, Earth-Sciences and a lot more. These are all fields that have used crowdsourcing and have published papers about crowdsourcing. In fact, MobileWorks came out of UC Berkeley where the founders were doing research in HCI using crowdsourcing before we started building our own platform because we thought the existing competitors were a pain to use.