Counting with the Crowd

Summary: Crowdsourced selectivity estimation for predicates without full scans, leveraging workers to estimate the fraction of items satisfying a property. Counts (showing items) excel for image datasets, while sampled labeling wins on text; a spammer/collusion detector boosts accuracy by up to 100×. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: he4310471f3c0bd9b
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2013
Pagerank: 9.3636304e-05
Overall Rank: 1,926 | 87.06%
DOI: 10.14778/2536222.2536228

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Adam Marcus (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
2. David Karger (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
3. Samuel Madden (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
4. Robert Miller (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
5. Sewoong Oh (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

BibTeX Citation

@article{marcus_vldb13,
        title = {{Counting with the Crowd}},
        author = {Marcus, Adam and Karger, David and Madden, Samuel and Miller, Robert and Oh, Sewoong},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '13},
        volume = {6},
        number = {2},
        pages = {109--120},
        doi = {10.14778/2536222.2536228},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2536222.2536228},
        year = {2013}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 19 of 19 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,655	Falcon: Scaling Up Hands-Off Crowdsourced Entity Matching to Build Cloud Services	2017	SIGMOD	9.9694129e-05
2,505	Query-Oriented Data Cleaning with Oracles	2015	SIGMOD	8.3743595e-05
2,643	Scaling Up Crowd-Sourcing to Very Large Datasets: A Case for Active Learning	2015	VLDB	8.1741373e-05
3,668	Revisiting Prompt Engineering via Declarative Crowdsourcing	2024	CIDR	7.1144218e-05
3,840	QASCA: A Quality-Aware Task Assignment System for Crowdsourcing Applications	2015	SIGMOD	6.988858e-05
4,025	CLAMShell: Speeding up Crowds for Low-latency Data Labeling	2016	VLDB	6.8439934e-05
5,309	SemBench: A Benchmark for Semantic Query Processing Engines	2026	VLDB	6.1841176e-05
5,572	Efficient Algorithms for Crowd-Aided Categorization	2020	VLDB	6.078318e-05
6,400	Human-in-the-loop Data Integration	2017	VLDB	5.7962311e-05
6,539	QOCO: A Query Oriented Data Cleaning System with Oracles	2015	VLDB	5.7507888e-05
6,633	Budget Constrained Interactive Search for Multiple Targets	2021	VLDB	5.724725e-05
6,928	Interactive Graph Search	2019	SIGMOD	5.6397012e-05
7,230	OASSIS: Query Driven Crowd Mining	2014	SIGMOD	5.5779439e-05
7,505	Crowdsourced Data Management: Overview and Challenges	2017	SIGMOD	5.5057737e-05
8,959	Managing General and Individual Knowledge in Crowd Mining Applications	2015	CIDR	5.2496174e-05
9,200	Interactive Graph Search for Multiple Targets on DAGs	2025	VLDB	5.2086045e-05
9,459	Ontology Assisted Crowd Mining	2014	VLDB	5.1727984e-05
9,591	CDB: Optimizing Queries with Crowd-Based Selections and Joins	2017	SIGMOD	5.154741e-05
12,218	A Rating-Ranking Method for Crowdsourced Top-k Computation	2018	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
92	CrowdDB: Answering Queries with Crowdsourcing	2011	SIGMOD	0.00034670735
257	Crowdsourced Databases: Query Processing with People	2011	CIDR	0.00022958404
259	Answering Queries using Humans, Algorithms and Databases	2011	CIDR	0.00022916014
266	Human-powered Sorts and Joins	2012	VLDB	0.00022735106
750	So Who Won? Dynamic Max Discovery with the Crowd	2012	SIGMOD	0.00014258988
987	CrowdScreen: Algorithms for Filtering Data with Humans	2012	SIGMOD	0.00012655094

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	9,591	CDB: Optimizing Queries with Crowd-Based Selections and Joins	2017	SIGMOD
2	58	Statistical Estimators for Relational Algebra Expressions	1988	PODS
3	2,643	Scaling Up Crowd-Sourcing to Very Large Datasets: A Case for Active Learning	2015	VLDB
4	92	CrowdDB: Answering Queries with Crowdsourcing	2011	SIGMOD
5	3,132	Every Row Counts: Combining Sketches and Sampling for Accurate Group-By Result Estimates	2019	CIDR
6	266	Human-powered Sorts and Joins	2012	VLDB
7	5,027	Crowdsourced Top-k Algorithms: An Experimental Evaluation	2016	VLDB
8	987	CrowdScreen: Algorithms for Filtering Data with Humans	2012	SIGMOD
9	257	Crowdsourced Databases: Query Processing with People	2011	CIDR
10	7,152	Learning to Sample: Counting with Complex Queries	2020	VLDB