Speaker: 

Krzysztof Gajos

Associate Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University

Title:

Human-Computer Interaction Research in the Wild

Abstract:

Krzysztof will share results of two projects, both of which are a part of our larger effort to develop gic rather than social mechanisms for coordinating work, which enables productive use of even the smallest human contributions. Unlike conventional crowdsourcing, organic crowdsourcing leverages participants' intrinsic motivation to attract free, high quality contributions from knowledgeable participants.

LabintheWild.org is a platform for conducting behavioral experiments with unpaid online volunteers. Volunteers from all over the world participate in LabintheWild studies in exchange for personalized feedback on their performance. Over the past three years, LabintheWild has attracted nearly 3 million distinct visitors from over 200 countries and resulted in over 1 million completed experimental sessions. We have validated this platform by demonstrating that results obtained on LabintheWild match those obtained in traditional laboratory settings. LabintheWild has made it possible for us to conduct research that would not have been feasible with traditional methods. Krzysztof will summarize the findings from several experiments conducted on LabintheWild and synthesize the emerging set of best practices for designing studies that attract intrinsically motivated participants and for ensuring validity of the data. Eneralizable mechanisms to engage intrinsically motivated online volunteers to collectively accomplish large tasks.

The Idea Hound project exemplifies our contributions to the largely unexplored area of "organic" crowdsourcing, an approach to human computation in which intrinsically motivated people contribute to algorithmically coordinated human computation workflows as a byproduct of performing activities that they find inherently valuable. In contrast to earlier peer production systems like Wikipedia, organic crowdsourcing relies on algorithm.

Bio:

Krzysztof Gajos is an associate professor of Computer Science at the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Krzysztof is broadly interested in intelligent interactive systems, a research area that bridges artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Recent projects pursued by his group contributed to diverse areas such as personalized adaptive user interfaces, systems for supporting collective creativity, organic crowdsourcing, large-scale experimentation in the wild, and learning technologies.

Prior to arriving at Harvard, Krzysztof was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington and his M.Eng. and B.Sc. degrees from MIT. In the Fall of 2005, he was visiting faculty at the Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana, where he taught Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. Krzysztof is a coeditor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems. He is a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship.