In recent years, we developed CrowdSearcher, which integrates a conceptual framework, a specification procedure and a reactive execution control environment for designing, deploying, and monitoring crowd-based applications on top of social systems, including social networks and crowdsourcing platforms.

We show how social platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter, can be used for crowdsourcing search-related tasks, side by side with traditional crowdsourcing platforms; and we show how controlling the quality of performers and of results can lead to increased performance and interoperability.

The contribution of this talk is a broad vision that brings together crowdsourcing, social networking, expertise finding, reactive rules and multi-platform system integration, at the purpose of increasing effectiveness of crowd-based applications.

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BIOGRAPHY Stefano Ceri is professor of Database Systems at the Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria (DEIB) of Politecnico di Milano. He was visiting professor at the Computer Science Department of Stanford University (19831990), and he is the director of Alta Scuola Politecnica, the school of excellence for top-level master students selected from Engineering, Architecture, and Design Faculties of Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino. His research work covers over three decades (1976–2013) and has been generally concerned with extending database technologies in order to incorporate new features: distribution, objectorientation, rules, streaming data; with the advent of the Web, his research has been targeted towards the engineering of Web-based applications and search systems. More recently he turned to crowdsearching and to genomic computing. He was awarded an advanced ERC Grant on Search Computing (November 2008 – October 2013), described in http://www.search-computing.it. He is national coordinator of the PRIN Project GenData 2020, focused on building query and data analysis systems for genomic data as produced by fast DNA sequencing technology (February 2013 – January 2016). He is author of about 300 publications on international journals and conferences (H index 57) and of 10 international books; the book Web Information Retrieval is in print (Springer-Verlag). He is co-editor in chief (with Mike Carey) of the book series “Data Centric Systems and Applications” (Springer-Verlag). He is the recipient of the ACM-SIGMOD “Edward T. Codd Innovation Award” (New York, June 26, 2013).