GROUP 2018 Special Issue Guest Editorial: Another 25 Years of GROUP

For over 25 years, the ACM International Conference on Supporting GroupWork (GROUP) has been and will continue to be the premier venue for research on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work,Human–Computer Interaction, Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, and Socio-Technical Studies. The three papers in this special issue demonstrate GROUP’s continued commitment to diverse research approaches, emerging technologies, and collaborative work. We hope you enjoy these papers and, like us, look forward to another 25 years of GROUP.https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146739/1/Robert et al. 2018.pdfDescription of Robert et al. 2018.pdf : Articl

Deep Thermal Imaging: Proximate Material Type Recognition in the Wild through Deep Learning of Spatial Surface Temperature Patterns

We introduce Deep Thermal Imaging, a new approach for close-range automatic recognition of materials to enhance the understanding of people and ubiquitous technologies of their proximal environment. Our approach uses a low-cost mobile thermal camera integrated into a smartphone to capture thermal textures. A deep neural network classifies these textures into material types. This approach works effectively without the need for ambient light sources or direct contact with materials. Furthermore, the use of a deep learning network removes the need to handcraft the set of features for different materials. We evaluated the performance of the system by training it to recognise 32 material types in both indoor and outdoor environments. Our approach produced recognition accuracies above 98% in 14,860 images of 15 indoor materials and above 89% in 26,584 images of 17 outdoor materials. We conclude by discussing its potentials for real-time use in HCI applications and future directions.Comment: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System

Home is Where the Lab is: A Comparison of Online and Lab Data From a Time-sensitive Study of Interruption

While experiments have been run online for some time with positive results, there are still outstanding questions about the kinds of tasks that can be successfully deployed to remotely situated online participants. Some tasks, such as menu selection, have worked well but these do not represent the gamut of tasks that interest HCI researchers. In particular, we wondered whether long-lasting, time-sensitive tasks that require continuous concentration could work successfully online, given the confounding effects that might accompany the online deployment of such a task. We ran an archetypal interruption experiment both online and in the lab to investigate whether studies demonstrating such characteristics might be more vulnerable to a loss of control than the short, time-insensitive studies that are representative of the majority of previous online studies. Statistical comparisons showed no significant differences in performance on a number of dimensions. However, there were issues with data quality that stemmed from participants misunderstanding the task. Our findings suggest that long-lasting experiments using time-sensitive performance measures can be run online but that care must be taken when introducing participants to experimental procedures

Overview of New Forms of Employment - 2018 Update

Across Europe, new forms of employment are emerging that differ significantly from traditional employment. Some of these forms of employment transform the relationship between employer and employee while others change work organisation and work patterns. They often involve locations other than the usual employer’s premises, and or extensive use of information and communications technology. This report identifies nine forms of employment that are either new or have become increasingly important in Europe since the year 2000. All of the nine forms discussed are aimed at increasing flexibility for employers and/or employees. Some may benefit employers and employees equally, but in a few cases there are concerns regarding their impact on working conditions and the labour market. The report highlights the need for awareness of potential problems and of safety nets for workers

Crowdsourcing: A New Way to Citizen Empowerment

Empowerment has for a long time held a prominent place in the theoretical development of fields as diverse as development studies, community psychology or studies on social movements and organisations, among other areas. In parallel, multilateral agencies and non-profit organizations have launched empowerment processes in different sociocultural and political contexts with an uneven impact. On the other hand, the advance of Web 2.0 technologies has allowed crowdsourcing to establish itself as one of the most successful collaborative approaches through the internet, particularly in the business world. In this chapter the authors present a definition of the concept empowerment-oriented crowdsourcing on the basis of the review of the theoretical and practical developments of both dynamics. The objective is to delineate the framework that facilitates the implementation of processes of citizen empowerment through crowdsourcing projects that seek social benefit.Álvarez Sánchez, D.; Pardo Gimilio, D.; Isnardo Altamirano, J. (2015). Crowdsourcing: A New Way to Citizen Empowerment. En Advances in Crowdsourcing. Springer. 73-86. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-18341-1_6S7386Aitamurto, T. (2012). Crowdsourcing for democracy: A new era in policy-making. Committee for the Future, Parliament of Finland. http://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Crowdsourcing_for_DemocracyF_www.pdf . Accessed October 4, 2014.Antorini, Y. M., Muñiz, A. M., & Askildsen, T. (2012). Collaborating with customer communities: Lessons from the LEGO Group. MIT Sloan Management Review, 53(3), 73–79.Brabham, D. C. (2008). Crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving: an introduction and cases. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 14, 75–90. doi: 10.1177/1354856507084420 .Brabham, D. C. (2009). Crowdsourcing the public participation process for planning projects. Planning Theory, 8, 242–262. doi: 10.1177/1473095209104824 .Burger-Helmchen, T., Pénin, J. (2010). The limits of crowdsourcing inventive activities: What do transaction cost theory and the evolutionary theories of the firm teach us? In Working Papers of BETA (Bureau d’Economie Théorique et Appliquée), Strasbourg, France.Chesbrough, H. (2003). Open innovation: The new imperative for creating and profiting from technology. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.Estellés, E., & González, F. (2012a). Clasificación de iniciativas de crowdsourcing basada en tareas. El Profesional de la Información, 21(3), 283–291.Estellés, E., & González, F. (2012b). Towards an integrated crowdsourcing definition. Journal of Information Science, 38(2), 189–200.Foucault, M. (1999). Estrategias de poder. Barcelona: Paidós.Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogía del oprimido. Madrid: Siglo XXI.FRIDE. (2006). Empowerment. In Development Backgrounder, 1. http://www.fride.org/descarga/bgr_empowerment_eng_may06.pdf . Accessed September 14, 2014.Geerts, S. (2009). Discovering crowdsourcing: theory, classification and directions for use. Master’s Thesis, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands. http://alexandria.tue.nl/extra2/afstversl/tm/Geerts%202009.pdf . Accessed October 2, 2014.Geiger, D., Seedorf, S., Schulze, T., Nickerson, R. C., & Schader, M. (2011). Managing the crowd: Towards a taxonomy of crowdsourcing processes. In AMCIS 011 Proceedings—All Submissions, Paper 430. http://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2011_submissions/430 . Accessed October 2, 2014.Gutiérrez-Rubí, A., & Freire, J. (2012). Manifiesto crowd: La empresa y la inteligencia de las multitudes. Laboratorio de Tendencias. http://www.gutierrez-rubi.es/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/manifiesto_crowd.pdf . Accessed October 2, 2014.Howe, J. (2006). The rise of crowdsourcing. Wired, 14(6), 1–4. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html . Accessed October 4, 2014.Howe, J. (2008). Crowdsourcing: Why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business. New York: Crown Business.Kabeer, N. (1999). Resources, agency, achievements: Reflections on the measurement of women’s empowerment. Development and Change, 30(3), 435–464.Kazai, G. (2011). In search of quality in crowdsourcing for search engine evaluation. Lecture notes in computer science, advances in information retrieval (pp. 165–176). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.Kieffer, C. H. (1984). Citizen empowerment: A developmental perspective. In J. Rappaport, C. F. Swift, & R. Hess (Eds.), Studies in empowerment: Steps toward understanding and action (pp. 9–36). New York: Haworth Press.Lesser, E., Ransom, D., Shah, R., & Pulver, B. (2012). Collective intelligence: Capitalizing on the crowd. IBM global business services. http://www.bic-innovation.com/static/bic/knowledge_base/documents/IBM3.pdf . Accessed April 9, 2015.Murguialday, C., Pérez-de-Armiño, K., & Eizagirre, M. (2006). Empoderamiento. In Hegoa (Ed.), Diccionario de Acción Humanitaria y Cooperación al Desarrollo. http://www.dicc.hegoa.ehu.es/listar/mostrar/86 . Accessed September 14, 2014.Narayan-Parker, D. (2002). Empowerment and poverty reduction: A sourcebook. Washington, DC: World Bank Publications.Ortiz de Zárate, A. (2012). Modelo LUDO: el gobierno abierto desde la perspectiva del ciclo de las políticas públicas. GIGAPP- IUIOG. Estudios Working Papers. 2012–2015. http://www.gigapp.org/administrator/components/com_jresearch/files/publications/WP-2012-15.pdf . Accessed October 4, 2014.Rappaport, J. (1987). Terms of empowernment/exemplars of prevention: Toward a theory for community psychology. American Journal of Community Pshychology, 15(2), 121–148.Rappaport, J., Swift, C. F., & Hess, R. (1984). 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Citizen-led Work using Social Computing and Procedural Guidance

Online platforms enable people to interact with friends, family, and the world at large. How might people go beyond sharing stories and ideas to building and testing theories in the real world? While many are motivated to dig deeper into their lived experience, limited expertise and lack of platform support make complex activities like experimentation dauntingly hard. Novices benefit greatly from expert guidance: this thesis advocates baking the guidance into the interface itself.This dissertation introduces procedural guidance to build just-in-time expertise for difficult tasks. Procedural guidance has multiple advantages: it is minimal, leverages teachable moments, and can be ability-specific. This dissertation instantiates this insight of procedural guidance through a sequence of increasingly complex social computing systems: Gut Instinct for curating ideas, Docent for generating hypotheses, and Galileo for citizen-led experiments.Gut Instinct hosts online learning materials and enables people to collaboratively brainstorm potential influences on people’s microbiome. Docent explicitly teaches people to create hypotheses by combining personal insights and online learning with task-specific scaffolding. Finally, Galileo reifies experimentation in the software, provides multiple roles for contribution, and automatically manages interdependencies. Multiple evaluations—controlled experiments and field deployments with online communities including American Gut participants—demonstrate that procedural guidance enables people to transform intuitions to hypotheses and structurally-sound experiments. By enabling people to draw on lived experience, this dissertation harbingers a future where people can convert their intuitions to actionable plans and implement these plans with online communities. This dissertation concludes by discussing opportunities for complex work using social computing platforms

A Multi-Dimensional Approach for Framing Crowdsourcing Archetypes

All different kinds of organizations – business, public, and non-governmental alike – are becoming aware of a soaring complexity in problem solving, decision making and idea development. In a multitude of circumstances, multidisciplinary teams, high-caliber skilled resources and world-class computer suites do not suffice to cope with such a complexity: in fact, a further need concerns the sharing and ‘externalization’ of tacit knowledge already existing in the society. In this direction, participatory tendencies flourishing in the interconnected society in which we live today lead ‘collective intelligence’ to emerge as key ingredient of distributed problem solving systems going well beyond the traditional boundaries of organizations. Resulting outputs can remarkably enrich decision processes and creative processes carried out by indoor experts, allowing organizations to reap benefits in terms of opportunity, time and cost. Taking stock of the mare magnum of promising opportunities to be tapped, of the inherent diversity lying among them, and of the enormous success of some initiative launched hitherto, the thesis aspires to provide a sound basis for the clear comprehension and systematic exploitation of crowdsourcing. After a thorough literature review, the thesis explores new ways for formalizing crowdsourcing models with the aim of distilling a brand-new multi-dimensional framework to categorize various crowdsourcing archetypes. To say it in a nutshell, the proposed framework combines two dimensions (i.e., motivations to participate and organization of external solvers) in order to portray six archetypes. Among the numerous significant elements of novelty brought by this framework, the prominent one is the ‘holistic’ approach that combines both profit and non-profit, trying to put private and public sectors under a common roof in order to examine in a whole corpus the multi-faceted mechanisms for mobilizing and harnessing competence and expertise which are distributed among the crowd. Looking at how the crowd may be turned into value to be internalized by organizations, the thesis examines crowdsourcing practices in the public as well in the private sector. Regarding the former, the investigation leverages the experience into the PADGETS project through action research – drawing on theoretical studies as well as on intensive fieldwork activities – to systematize how crowdsourcing can be fruitfully incorporated into the policy lifecycle. Concerning the private realm, a cohort of real cases in the limelight is examined – having recourse to case study methodology – to formalize different ways through which crowdsourcing becomes a business model game-changer. Finally, the two perspectives (i.e., public and private) are coalesced into an integrated view acting as a backdrop for proposing next-generation governance model massively hinged on crowdsourcing. In fact, drawing on archetypes schematized, the thesis depicts a potential paradigm that government may embrace in the coming future to tap the potential of collective intelligence, thus maximizing the utilization of a resource that today seems certainly underexploited