Atelier: Repurposing Expert Crowdsourcing Tasks as Micro-internships
Complex Tasks and Learning in Crowdsourcing
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Suzuki, Ryo
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Salehi, Niloufar
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Lam, Michelle S.
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Marroquin, Juan C.
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Bernstein, Michael S.
Proceedings of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2016-05-07
v.1
p.2645-2656
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: Expert crowdsourcing marketplaces have untapped potential to empower
workers' career and skill development. Currently, many workers cannot afford to
invest the time and sacrifice the earnings required to learn a new skill, and a
lack of experience makes it difficult to get job offers even if they do. In
this paper, we seek to lower the threshold to skill development by repurposing
existing tasks on the marketplace as mentored, paid, real-world work
experiences, which we refer to as micro-internships. We instantiate this idea
in Atelier, a micro-internship platform that connects crowd interns with crowd
mentors. Atelier guides mentor-intern pairs to break down expert crowdsourcing
tasks into milestones, review intermediate output, and problem-solve together.
We conducted a field experiment comparing Atelier's mentorship model to a
non-mentored alternative on a real-world programming crowdsourcing task,
finding that Atelier helped interns maintain forward progress and absorb best
practices.
Historical Research Using Email Archives
Case Studies: Education & Work
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Hangal, Sudheendra
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Piratla, Vihari
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Manovit, Chaiyasit
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Chan, Peter
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Edwards, Glynn
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Lam, Monica S.
Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI'15 Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems
2015-04-18
v.2
p.735-742
© Copyright 2015 ACM
Summary: Archives of letters and documents belonging to individuals provide valuable
insights into history. In the digital age, such history is being captured in
personal digital archives, especially in the form of email. Archival
organizations have recognized the importance of email archives and often
collect email when they acquire the papers of eminent donors; however they find
it difficult to screen, process and provide access to email for research, due
to its sheer volume. We describe the considerations we encountered with the
email archives of two prominent individuals in the special collections of
Stanford University Libraries. We have designed novel approaches to the
challenges of (1) Reconciliation with authority records, (2) Making "finding
aids" of the archive available to the general public, without revealing
confidential information, and (3) Browsing an email archive when one may not
know what exactly to look for. Our solutions have been implemented in a
publicly available and open source system called ePADD. As a result, we enable
donors and archival organizations to appraise, process and screen large-scale
email archives, thereby unlocking the historical value embedded in them.
Creating Instantly Disappearing Prints Using Thermochromic Paint and Thermal
Printer in an Interactive Art Installation
Designing for Smart and Ambient Devices
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Lam, Miu-Ling
DUXU 2013: 2nd International Conference on Design, User Experience, and
Usability, Part III: User Experience in Novel Technological Environments
2013-07-21
v.3
p.290-295
Keywords: Thermochromism; thermal printer; temporary image; ephemeral; fading;
interactive art; installation
© Copyright 2013 Springer-Verlag
Summary: This paper outlines the techniques used in an interactive art installation,
called Time Axis, created by the author. The installation invites viewers to
take a portrait of themselves in front of a wall-mounted device that is
embedded with a camera and thermal printers. The image captured by the camera
will be printed on paper by the thermal printers. One of the thermal printers
is loaded with some custom-made thermochromic paper that changes color
reversibly when temperature is changed. Images printed on the thermochromic
paper will disappear due to heat loss to surroundings after a few seconds of
being printed out. Thus, the participants will witness the silhouettes of their
portraits appearing and dissipating on paper instantly. The mechanical noise
generated by the printers is manipulated by a digital resonator and sent
through a pair of headphones to be listened by the participants to intensify
their experience.
Weaving a safe web of news
SNOW'13 opening
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Kiscuitwala, Kanak
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Bult, Willem
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Lécuyer, Mathias
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Purtell, T. J.
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Ross, Madeline K. B.
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Chaintreau, Augustin
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Haseman, Chris
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Lam, Monica S.
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McGregor, Susan E.
Companion Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on the World Wide
Web
2013-05-13
v.2
p.849-852
© Copyright 2013 ACM
Summary: The rise of social media and data-capable mobile devices in recent years has
transformed the face of global journalism, supplanting the broadcast news
anchor with a new source for breaking news: the citizen reporter. Social
media's decentralized networks and instant re-broadcasting mechanisms mean that
the reach of a single tweet can easily trump that of the most powerful
broadcast satellite. Brief, text-based and easy to translate, social messages
allow news audiences to skip the middleman and get news "straight from the
source."
Whether used by "citizen" or professional reporters, however, social media
technologies can also pose risks that endanger these individuals and, by
extension, the press as a whole. First, social media platforms are usually
proprietary, leaving users' data and activities on the system open to scrutiny
by collaborating companies and/or governments. Second, the networks upon which
social media reporting relies are inherently fragile, consisting of easily
targeted devices and relatively centralized message-routing systems that
authorities may block or simply shut down. Finally, this same privileged access
can be used to flood the network with inaccurate or discrediting messages,
drowning the signal of real events in misleading noise.
A citizen journalist can be anyone who is simply in the right place at the
right time. Typically untrained and unevenly tech-savvy, citizen reporters are
unaccustomed to thinking of their social media activities as high-risk, and may
not consider the need to defend themselves against potential threats. Though
often part of a crowd, they may have no formal affiliations; if targeted for
retaliation, they may have nowhere to turn for help. The dangers citizen
journalists face are personal and physical. They may be targeted in the act of
reporting, and/or online through the tracking of their digital communications.
Addressing their needs for protection, resilience, and recognition requires a
move away from the major assumptions of in vitro communication security. For
citizen journalists using social networks, the adversary is already inside, as
the network itself may be controlled or influenced by the threatening party,
while "outside" nodes, such as public figures, protest organizers, and other
journalists can be trusted to handle content appropriately. In these
circumstances there can be no seamless, guaranteed solution. Yet the need
remains for technologies that improve the security of these journalists who in
many cases may constitute a region's only independent press.
In this paper, we argue that a comprehensive and collaborative effort is
required to make publishing and interacting with news websites more secure.
Journalists typically enjoy stronger legal protection at least in some
countries, such as the United States. However, this protection may prove
ineffective, as many online tools compromise source protection. In the
remaining sections, we identify a set of discussion topics and challenges to
encourage a broader research agenda aiming to address jointly the need for
social features and security for citizens journalists and readers alike. We
believe communication technologies should embrace the methods and possibilities
of social news rather than treating this as a pure security problem. We briefly
touch upon a related initiative, Dispatch, that focuses on providing security
to citizen journalists for publisihing content.
How mobile disrupts social as we know it
Keynote address
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Lam, Monica S.
Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Intelligent User
Interfaces
2013-03-19
v.1
p.315-316
© Copyright 2013 ACM
Summary: Every computer revolution changes our lives dramatically; so will mobile
devices. Mobile devices enable billions of people to capture, share, interact,
and consume real-time personal media in new and creative ways. In addition,
being devices owned by individuals, they can form an autonomous computing
fabric that frees us from the domination of existing centralized proprietary
social networking services
This talk presents a system architecture called Musubi (Mobile, Social, and
UBIquitous) that combines a novel and natural mobile social experience with a
clean architecture that lets users choose different cloud backup services. In
addition, Musubi is an app platform that makes it easy to create
privacy-honoring social apps. This can open up new markets for social and
collaborative apps in fields like education, health and businesses, where
centralized proprietary services are inappropriate. A fully working prototype
of Musubi is available on both the Android and iPhone app store.
Musubi: disintermediated interactive social feeds for mobile devices
Mobile and file-sharing users
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Dodson, Ben
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Vo, Ian
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Purtell, T. J.
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Cannon, Aemon
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Lam, Monica
Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on the World Wide Web
2012-04-16
v.1
p.211-220
© Copyright 2012 ACM
Summary: This paper presents Musubi, a mobile social application platform that
enables users to share any data type in real-time feeds created by any
application on the phone. Musubi is unique in providing a disintermediated
service to end users; all communication is supported using public key
encryption thus leaking no user information to a third party. Despite the heavy
use of cryptography to provide user authentication and access control, users
found Musubi simple to use. We embed key exchange within familiar friending
actions, and allow users to interact with any friend in their address books
without requiring them to join a common network a priori. Our feed abstraction
allows users to easily exercise access control. All data reside on the phone,
granting users the freedom to apply applications of their choice.
In addition to disintermediating personal messaging, we have created an
application platform to support multi-party software with the same respect for
personal data. The SocialKit library we created on top of Musubi's trusted
communication protocol facilitates the development of multi-party applications
and integrates with Musubi to provide a compelling group application
experience. SocialKit allows developers to make social, interactive,
privacy-honoring applications without needing to host their own servers.
Effective browsing and serendipitous discovery with an experience-infused
browser
Personalization, search & usability
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Hangal, Sudheendra
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Nagpal, Abhinay
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Lam, Monica
Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Intelligent User
Interfaces
2012-02-14
p.149-158
© Copyright 2012 ACM
Summary: In the digital age, users can have perfect recall of their online
experiences. In this paper, we explore how this recall can be leveraged during
web browsing.
We have built a system called the Experience-Infused Browser that indexes a
user's digital history such as email and chat archives. As the user browses the
web, it observes the contents of pages viewed, and appropriately highlights
named entities on the page that the user has encountered in the past. This
browser has two benefits. First, it highlights terms on the page that occur
frequently in the user's communications, effectively personalizing the page for
the user. Second, the system can remind the user of names that he has
encountered in the past but may not remember.
We evaluated how users reacted to the browser during organic web browsing.
Our users have reported that it was useful on crowded web pages to surface
content that they otherwise may have missed, and in recalling serendipitous
connections to people that they had forgotten. Most of our users said they
would use the browser beyond the experimental study, indicating that they
derived clear benefit from it.
Friends, Romans, countrymen: lend me your URLs. Using social chatter to
personalize web search
Twitter and social transparency
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Nagpal, Abhinay
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Hangal, Sudheendra
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Joyee, Rifat Reza
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Lam, Monica S.
Proceedings of ACM CSCW'12 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
2012-02-11
v.1
p.461-470
© Copyright 2012 ACM
Summary: People often find useful content on the web via social media. However, it is
difficult for users to aggregate the information and recommendations embedded
in a torrent of social feeds like email and Twitter. At the same time, the
ever-growing size of the web and attempts to spam commercial search engines
make it a challenge for users to get search results relevant to their unique
background and interests. To address this problem, we propose ways to let users
mine their own social chatter and extract people, pages and sites of potential
interest. This information can be used to effectively personalize their web
search results. Our approach has the benefits of generating personalized and
socially curated results, removing web spam and preserving user privacy.
We have built a system called Slant to automatically mine a user's email and
Twitter feeds and populate four personalized search indices that are used to
augment regular web search. We evaluated these indices with users and found
that the small slice of the web indexed using social chatter can produce
results that are equally or better liked by users compared to personalized
search by a commercial search engine. We find that user satisfaction with
search results can be improved by combining the best results from multiple
indices.
MUSE: reviving memories using email archives
Social information
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Hangal, Sudheendra
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Lam, Monica S.
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Heer, Jeffrey
Proceedings of the 201 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and
Technology1
2011-10-16
v.1
p.75-84
© Copyright 2011 ACM
Summary: Email archives silently record our actions and thoughts over the years,
forming a passively acquired and detailed life-log that contains rich material
for reminiscing on our lives. However, exploratory browsing of archives
containing thousands of messages is tedious without effective ways to guide the
user towards interesting events and messages. We present Muse (Memories USing
Email), a system that combines data mining techniques and an interactive
interface to help users browse a long-term email archive. Muse analyzes the
contents of the archive and generates a set of cues that help to spark users'
memories: communication activity with inferred social groups, a summary of
recurring named entities, occurrence of sentimental words, and image
attachments. These cues serve as salient entry points into a browsing interface
that enables faceted navigation and rapid skimming of email messages. In our
user studies, we found that users generally enjoyed browsing their archives
with Muse, and extracted a range of benefits, from summarizing work progress to
renewing friendships and making serendipitous discoveries.
Groups without tears: mining social topologies from email
Social computing and navigation
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MacLean, Diana
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Hangal, Sudheendra
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Teh, Seng Keat
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Lam, Monica S.
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Heer, Jeffrey
Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Intelligent User
Interfaces
2011-02-13
p.83-92
© Copyright 2011 ACM
Summary: As people accumulate hundreds of "friends" in social media, a flat list of
connections becomes unmanageable. Interfaces agnostic to social structure
hinder the nuanced sharing of personal data such as photos, status updates,
news feeds, and comments. To address this problem, we propose social
topologies, a set of potentially overlapping and nested social groups, that
represent the structure and content of a person's social network as a
first-class object. We contribute an algorithm for creating social topologies
by mining communication history and identifying likely groups based on
co-occurrence patterns. We use our algorithm to populate a browser interface
that supports creation and editing of social groups via direct manipulation. A
user study confirms that our approach models subjects' social topologies well,
and that our interface enables intuitive browsing and management of a personal
social landscape.
Reading in First Nations and the on-demand book service
Posters
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Caidi, Nadia
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Lam, Margaret
Proceedings of the 2011 iConference
2011-02-08
p.651-652
© Copyright 2011 ACM
Summary: The "On-Demand Book Service (ODBS)" is a collaboration between First Nations
communities in Northern Ontario and academic researchers from the University of
Toronto. The aim of the ODBS is to bridge the gap between physical and digital
libraries. The latest workshop (organized in March of 2010) dealt with issues
of reading in First Nations communities; and included the shipping of three
complete sets of ODBS equipment to three Northern Ontario communities. In
addition, graduate students were sent to various sites (Thunder Bay, Sioux
Lookout and Keewaywin) to meet in person with community members, act as
facilitators, and assist with setting up the equipment and getting a sense of
potential uses. Indeed, there is an obvious service gap that technology and
equipment cannot bridge, and the on-going challenge remains the articulation of
a community-driven strategy. This poster will present initial feedback gathered
by following up with the event participants, the facilitators, as well as the
community members in the various sites. Their diverse perspectives present a
holistic picture of the On-Demand Book Service as perceived by the different
stakeholders, and may hold great insights to other such information and library
science projects that attempt to bridge great geographical and cultural
distances.
Multi-resolution model transmission in distributed virtual environments
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Chim, Jimmy H. P.
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Lau, Rynson W. H.
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Si, Antonio
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Leong, Hong Va
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To, Danny
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Green, Mark
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Lam, Miu Ling
Proceedings of the 1998 ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and
Technology
1998-11-02
p.25-34
© Copyright 1998 ACM
