Skip to content

Steven Dow And His Team Tackle Innovation In Crowdsourcing

Steven Dow And His Team Tackle Innovation In Crowdsourcing

Steven Dow And His Team Tackle Innovation In Crowdsourcing

As part of the Design Lab’s graduate course work on Crowdsourcing taught by Steven Dow, students explored models —such as paid micro-work, citizen science, crisis informatics, and games with a purpose— to bring large groups of people together to make something greater than any one person could achieve. For their final presentations, students innovated some wonderfully creative research projects: contributing novel methods, inventing new crowd technologies, and answering open questions about crowdsourcing.

Here are some of the projects Steven Dow and his team of students worked on:
  • Self-forming crowd teams: how micro-workers choose teammates (Markus Duecker, Andrew Dennis)
  • How to SOAR with crowds: strategic reading with crowdsourced lit reviews (Amy Rae Fox, Kandarp Khandwala, Tricia Ngoon)

  • Improving the livestream experience of Multiplayer Online Battle Arena events through “audience-sourcing” (Rahul Ramath)
  • Can soft skills be mined from Github? Expert and crowd analysis of open source software project conversations (Ariel Weingarten)

  • Preference matching in recommendation tasks using crowd clustering (Shawn Hyeonsu Kang)
  • Learning the secret of social charm in a game: You rate, we decode (Amanda Song, Shuai Tang, Mohammad Motiei)
  • Cream of the Crop: Recruiting expert crowd workers to disseminate their strategies to subsequent workers (Abhinav Mishra, Agneev Ghosh, Mansi Malik)

ABOUT STEVEN DOW:

Steven is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego where he researches human-computer interaction, social computing, and creativity. Steven received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2015 for research on “advancing collective innovation.” He was co-PI on three other National Science Foundation grants, a Google Faculty Grant, Stanford’s Postdoctoral Research Award, and the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Grant. Steven was on the faculty in the HCI Institute at CMU from 2011-2015. He holds an MS and PhD in Human-Centered Computing from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a BS in Industrial Engineering from University of Iowa.

As part of the Design Lab’s graduate course work on Crowdsourcing taught by Steven Dow, students explored models —such as paid micro-work, citizen science, crisis informatics, and games with a purpose— to bring large groups of people together to make something greater than any one person could achieve. For their final presentations, students innovated some wonderfully creative research projects: contributing novel methods, inventing new crowd technologies, and answering open questions about crowdsourcing.

Here are some of the projects Steven Dow and his team of students worked on:
  • Self-forming crowd teams: how micro-workers choose teammates (Markus Duecker, Andrew Dennis)
  • How to SOAR with crowds: strategic reading with crowdsourced lit reviews (Amy Rae Fox, Kandarp Khandwala, Tricia Ngoon)

  • Improving the livestream experience of Multiplayer Online Battle Arena events through “audience-sourcing” (Rahul Ramath)
  • Can soft skills be mined from Github? Expert and crowd analysis of open source software project conversations (Ariel Weingarten)

  • Preference matching in recommendation tasks using crowd clustering (Shawn Hyeonsu Kang)
  • Learning the secret of social charm in a game: You rate, we decode (Amanda Song, Shuai Tang, Mohammad Motiei)
  • Cream of the Crop: Recruiting expert crowd workers to disseminate their strategies to subsequent workers (Abhinav Mishra, Agneev Ghosh, Mansi Malik)

ABOUT STEVEN DOW:

Steven is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego where he researches human-computer interaction, social computing, and creativity. Steven received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2015 for research on “advancing collective innovation.” He was co-PI on three other National Science Foundation grants, a Google Faculty Grant, Stanford’s Postdoctoral Research Award, and the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Grant. Steven was on the faculty in the HCI Institute at CMU from 2011-2015. He holds an MS and PhD in Human-Centered Computing from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a BS in Industrial Engineering from University of Iowa.

As part of the Design Lab’s graduate course work on Crowdsourcing taught by Steven Dow, students explored models —such as paid micro-work, citizen science, crisis informatics, and games with a purpose— to bring large groups of people together to make something greater than any one person could achieve. For their final presentations, students innovated some wonderfully creative research projects: contributing novel methods, inventing new crowd technologies, and answering open questions about crowdsourcing.

Here are some of the projects Steven Dow and his team of students worked on:
  • Self-forming crowd teams: how micro-workers choose teammates (Markus Duecker, Andrew Dennis)
  • How to SOAR with crowds: strategic reading with crowdsourced lit reviews (Amy Rae Fox, Kandarp Khandwala, Tricia Ngoon)

  • Improving the livestream experience of Multiplayer Online Battle Arena events through “audience-sourcing” (Rahul Ramath)
  • Can soft skills be mined from Github? Expert and crowd analysis of open source software project conversations (Ariel Weingarten)

  • Preference matching in recommendation tasks using crowd clustering (Shawn Hyeonsu Kang)
  • Learning the secret of social charm in a game: You rate, we decode (Amanda Song, Shuai Tang, Mohammad Motiei)
  • Cream of the Crop: Recruiting expert crowd workers to disseminate their strategies to subsequent workers (Abhinav Mishra, Agneev Ghosh, Mansi Malik)

ABOUT STEVEN DOW:

Steven is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego where he researches human-computer interaction, social computing, and creativity. Steven received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2015 for research on “advancing collective innovation.” He was co-PI on three other National Science Foundation grants, a Google Faculty Grant, Stanford’s Postdoctoral Research Award, and the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Grant. Steven was on the faculty in the HCI Institute at CMU from 2011-2015. He holds an MS and PhD in Human-Centered Computing from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a BS in Industrial Engineering from University of Iowa.

Read Next

Human-centered Design

Community-Based, Human-Centered Design

Don Norman, Design Lab Director & Eli Spencer, Design Lab Faculty

We propose a radical change in design from experts designing for people to people designing for themselves. In the traditional approach, experts study, design, and implement solutions for the people of the world. Instead, we propose that we leverage the creativity within the communities of the world to solve their own problems: This is community-driven design, taking full advantage of the fact that it is the people in communities who best understand their problems and the impediments and affordances that impede and support change. Experts become facilitators, by mentoring and providing tools, toolkits, workshops, and support.

The principles of human-centered design have proven to be effective and productive. However, its approach is generally used in situations where professionals determine the needs of the target populations and then develop products and procedures to address the needs. This is Top-Down design: starting with higher-level conceptualizations and then refining the ideas and concepts to specific instances of products or services. This works well for mass produced items which only allows limited specialization for individual needs and requirements.
Mai Nguyen

Meet Mai Nguyen, UC San Diego New Director of the Design Lab

Mai Nguyen began her role as Director of The Design Lab in March of this year, but she will be making the move from her long-time home of Chapel Hill, North Carolina to San Diego this summer. Her excitement beams because, having grown up in Orange and Riverside counties, she considers herself a native Californian. “For me, this is coming home to a place that I’m very familiar with; a place that I saw grow and develop and become what it is today.” It is precisely witnessing the development of these regions over time that inspired her to pursue her graduate studies in sociology and urban planning . “I watched the Southern California landscape get dotted by more and more development and traffic--where sprawl met the wall. I also saw the lack of foresight and  planning—our policies, our practices, our design of space really created so many other problems because we didn’t think about the long-term consequences of our growth and development. So I come back to The Design Lab with that background.”
The Idea Lab: A Collaboration Preparing Students For The Future

The Idea Lab: A Collaboration Preparing Students for the Future

As humans, we tend to compartmentalize ourselves as being either logical or creative thinkers. Rarely do we realize that everything we contemplate and create is better when we are both. This unification of both solutions-oriented entrepreneurship and nonlinear design thinking is the foundation of a new UC San Diego student program called the Idea Lab.

The program is a part of UC San Diego’s commitment to being an innovation catalyst and to cultivating future leaders, according to Michèle Morris, Associate Director of The Design Lab. “The Idea Lab program focuses on preparing our students to step into the 21st-century job market with the mindset and skills needed to address today’s challenges with solutions that are not necessarily directed and linear,” she explains. “Being able to navigate ambiguity, engage strategically and collaboratively with diverse stakeholders, and tactically operate in an inclusive, wholistic manner is no longer simply important, it is essential.”

The Idea Lab pilot program was launched in Fall 2020 and is itself a collaboration between two unique centers within UC San Diego’s innovation ecosystem: Office of Innovation and Commercialization (OIC)/The Basement—a student startup incubator that provides entrepreneurial and leadership programs; and The Design Lab—an interdisciplinary research and education community that prioritizes how humans are impacted by complex systems and technologies.

Telestration: How Helena Mentis Applies Design Thinking to Surgery

Helena Mentis is the director of the Bodies in Motion Lab at University of Maryland, Baltimore County…

Nazima Ahmad is Putting People Over Profits by Connecting Art and Design at the Design Lab

If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that our communities are more important than ever. The pandemic has changed the ways in which we experience and perceive community—sometimes even causing us to feel that it has vanished. The past two years have been an uncertain time for those involved in the arts, with many creative professionals being impacted by dwindling audiences and interest. Nazima Ahmad, a Designer-in-Residence at The Design Lab, noticed the crumbling connection between artists and consumers and sought to find a way to mend it. Working with fellow designer Michelle Hoogenhout, the two were able to come up with City Canvas, a concept developed in collaboration with the Arts and Commission Department of the City of San Diego that won the 2020 SCALE San Diego Urban Innovation Challenge that works to make connecting with local artists easier for San Diego residents.

“Working with the city on that project was all-around trying to figure out how to promote the creative economy of San Diego,” says Ahmad of the goal of the project. Not only was the project a great success at Design Week, but it is also what led Ahmad to The Design Lab.
Don Norman Zdnet Over Automating Uc San Diego

Software Developers and Designers Risk Over-Automating Enterprises

Don Norman of Cognitive Science and the Design Lab argues for human-technology teamwork among designers in…

Back To Top