The crowd

Date: Wednesday, Sep 25

Time: 12-1pm

Room: GHC 6501 

Crowdsourcing and Aggregating Visual Design Critique 

Kurt Luther (Human Computer Interaction Institute)

Subjective critique provides a cornerstone for design education, guiding novice designers to improve their work and inculcating key principles and values. However, designers often struggle to find high-quality critique outside a firm or classroom, and current online feedback solutions are limited. We created a system called CrowdCrit which leverages paid crowdsourcing to generate and visualize high-quality visual design critique. To see how people would use CrowdCrit, we hosted a poster design contest where participants received crowd feedback between iterations.

Progress Update on Tiramisu Transit Research 

Aaron Steinfeld (The Robotics Institute)

In response to input from Tiramisu users and stakeholders, the team has introduced new crowd-oriented features and added new social computing functionality. These will allow the team to examine the impact of new user experiences during real world use. This talk will provide an overview of these changes and how they relate to the team's research efforts.


The Big Effects of Short-term Efforts: Catalysts for Community Engagement in Scientific Software
Erik Trainer (Institute for Software Institute)

Scientific progress relies crucially on software, yet in practice there are significant challenges to scientific software production and maintenance. We conducted a case study of a bioinformatics library called Biopython to investigate the promise of Summer of Code (SoC), a program originally developed by Google that pays students to work on open-source projects for the summer, for addressing these challenges. We find that SoC benefits students by engaging them with mentors and the community at large. SoC students learn how to contribute to open-source scientific software projects and how to apply their new software engineering skills in practice. We also find that SoC benefits the Biopython community by creating mentorship and communication networks that enable Biopython developers to more easily identify and implement users’ needs.


The Search and Use of Analogical Ideas in Crowd-sourced Innovation  
Lisa Yu (Human Computer Interaction Institute)

I will talk about a novel approach for re-presenting a problem in terms of its abstract structure, and then allowing people to use this structural representation to find analogies. I will also describe how analogical ideas can be used in a distributed innovation process: one crowd generates structural representations from the existing ideas and another crowd generates new idea using these representations.