On optimality of jury selection in crowdsourcing

Recent advances in crowdsourcing technologies enable computationally challenging tasks (e.g., sentiment analysis and entity resolution) to be performed by Internet workers, driven mainly by monetary incentives. A fundamental question is: how should workers be selected, so that the tasks in hand can be accomplished successfully and economically? In this paper, we study the Jury Selection Problem (JSP): Given a monetary budget, and a set of decision-making tasks (e.g., “Is Bill Gates still the CEO of Microsoft now?”), return the set of workers (called jury), such that their answers yield the highest “Jury Quality” (or JQ). Existing JSP solutions make use of the Majority Voting (MV) strategy, which uses the answer chosen by the largest number of workers. We show that MV does not yield the best solution for JSP. We further prove that among all voting strategies (including deterministic and randomized strategies), Bayesian Voting (BV) can optimally solve JSP. We then examine how to solve JSP based on BV. This is technically challenging, since computing the JQ with BV is NP-hard. We solve this problem by proposing an approximate algorithm that is computationally efficient. Our approximate JQ computation algorithm is also highly accurate, and its error is proved to be bounded within 1%. We extend our solution by considering the task owner’s “belief” (or prior) on the answers of the tasks. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets show that our new approach is consistently better than the best JSP solution known.published_or_final_versio

Colorado: Round 1 - State-Level Field Network Study of the Implementation of the Affordable Care Act

This report is part of a series of 21 state and regional studies examining the rollout of the ACA. The national network -- with 36 states and 61 researchers -- is led by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York, the Brookings Institution, and the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.Colorado is one of fourteen states and the District of Columbia that elected to operate a state-based health insurance exchange and to expand Medicaid in 2014 as part of the rollout of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). These decisions are consistent with Colorado's approach to health care reform. Before the ACA was signed into law in 2010, the state had made incremental expansions in Medicaid eligibility and laid the groundwork for an insurance marketplace

Digging Them Out Alive

From 2013-2018, we taught a collection of interrelated law and social work clinical courses, which we call “the Unger clinic.” This clinic was part of a major, multi-year criminal justice project, led by the Maryland Office of the Public Defender. The clinic and project responded to a need created by a 2012 Maryland Court of Appeals decision, Unger v. State. It, as later clarified, required that all Maryland prisoners who were convicted by juries before 1981—237 older, long-incarcerated prisoners—be given new trials. This was because prior to 1981 Maryland judges in criminal trials were required to instruct the jury that they—the jury—had the ultimate right to determine the law. Our clinic helped to implement Unger by providing a range of legal services and related social services to many of these prisoners. Through the five years, the great majority of the Unger group were released by agreements, on probation, and not retried. In all, approximately 85% of the 237—that is, 85% of all state prisoners in Maryland convicted by juries of violent crimes before 1981—were released. This article describes why and how we created the Unger Clinic; why we made it interdisciplinary; what the students and we learned in it and from our clients; and what we would do differently. We believe the clinical education model we developed—an interdisciplinary clinic working in partnership with a major legal services provider and a citizens’ advocacy group—can be used effectively to address other significant access-to-justice problems nationally. In the end, the Unger Project has been a criminal justice laboratory. The qualitative experiences support many criminal justice reforms with the overriding lesson being that the continued incarceration of older, long incarcerated prisoners convicted of violent crimes serves no public safety purpose

TRANSLATION IN LIBEL CASES: REPUTATIONS AT STAKE!

Abstract: In this paper we examine translation arising in court cases involving reputational damage. A diachronic and tightly focused cross-jurisdictional selection of examples from case law is used to highlight the range of ways in which translation can be employed, blamed, or relied upon by the parties and by the courts, and we glimpse how translations can be a source of libel, a defence against libel, or a gateway to libellous material, how crucial translation can be in protecting or damaging reputations, and how significantly it can affect a case’s outcome. We apply Engberg’s lens for communication in legal contexts, distinguishing micro, meso and macro occurrences of translation at publisher/business/individual, judicial, and State levels. Recurring translation-related topics either mooted by courts or arising in our analysis are then outlined, including: competing translations; translation techniques; translator identification; online translation; how the acceptance of jurisdiction may be influenced by translation requirements; and how judges approach decision-making when foreign language documents and translation are involved.Abstract: In this paper we examine translation arising in court cases involving reputational damage. A diachronic and tightly focused cross-jurisdictional selection of examples from case law is used to highlight the range of ways in which translation can be employed, blamed, or relied upon by the parties and by the courts, and we glimpse how translations can be a source of libel, a defence against libel, or a gateway to libellous material, how crucial translation can be in protecting or damaging reputations, and how significantly it can affect a case’s outcome. We apply Engberg’s lens for communication in legal contexts, distinguishing micro, meso and macro occurrences of translation at publisher/business/individual, judicial, and State levels. Recurring translation-related topics either mooted by courts or arising in our analysis are then outlined, including: competing translations; translation techniques; translator identification; online translation; how the acceptance of jurisdiction may be influenced by translation requirements; and how judges approach decision-making when foreign language documents and translation are involved

Answering Complex Location-Based Queries with Crowdsourcing

International audienceCrowdsourcing platforms provide powerful means to execute queries that require some human knowledge, intelligence and experience instead of just automated machine computation, such as image recognition, data filtering and labeling. With the development of mobile devices and the rapid prevalence of smartphones that boosted mobile Internet access, location-based crowdsourcing is quickly becoming ubiquitous, enabling location-based queries assigned to and performed by humans. In sharp contrast of existing location-based crowdsourcing approaches that focus on simple queries, in this paper, we describe a crowdsourcing process model that supports queries including several crowd activities, and can be applied in a variety of location-based crowdsourcing scenarios. We also propose different strategies for managing this crowdsourcing process. Finally, we describe the architecture of our system, and present an experimental study conducted on pseudo-real dataset that evaluates the process outcomes depending on these execution strategies

Court Review: The Journal of the American Judges Association 51:3 (2015)- Whole Issue

BOOK REVIEW 90 Writing Like the Best Judges. ARTICLES 94 Weddings, Whiter Teeth, Judicial-Campaign Speech, and More: Civil Cases in the Supreme Court’s 2014-2015 Term. 106 Making Continuous Improvement a Reality: Achieving High Performance in the Ottawa County, Michigan, Circuit and Probate Courts. 116 Implicit Bias and the American Juror. DEPARTMENTS 86 Editor’s Note. 87 President’s Column . 88 Thoughts from Canada. 122 Crossword. 126 Notice of Proposed Bylaws Changes. 128 The Resource Page

Tracing back Communities. An Analysis of Ars Electronica's Digital Communities archive from an ANT perspective

Since long before the popularization of the Web, community-making has been a significant driving force for the development of the Internet. As a consequence, in mid 1990s online communities became a key object of study at the intersection of social sciences, organizational studies and computer sciences. Today, about fifteen years after these early studies, the concept \u2018online community\u2019 seems to be at stake. As a matter of fact, while communitarian ties enabled by digital media are more and more invocated, in late 2000s the Internet is revealing itself as a much more bureaucratic and profit-oriented domain than ever, to the point that it is not clear whether there exist online ties that are specific enough to be called \u2018communitarian\u2019. In order to analyse such an opaque and unstable object of study as current techno-social assemblages, innovative methods specifically developed to study fuzzy objects have to be devised and some epistemological questions have to be addressed. This research starts indeed from the impasse that the digital communitarian culture is experiencing at the end of the 2000s and borrows some epistemological insights from the Actor-Network Theory. By analyzing the entry forms submitted to the world\u2019s leading competition for digital communities, Prix Ars Electronica, this research thus calls into question some \u2018black-boxed\u2019 concepts like \u2018cyberculture\u2019, \u2018digital revolution\u2019, \u2018empowerment\u2019 and \u2018online community\u2019 itself. On one hand, the results bring into question both leading sociological positions and hype-generated commonplaces. On the other hand, the results offer evidence to those arguments according to which current ICT developments represent the beginning of a new phase of technological enclosure

Justice wide open: working papers

These working papers mark the launch of the Centre of Law, Justice and Journalism’s new initiative, "Open Justice in the Digital Era", which aims to make recommendations for the way judicial information and legal data are communicated in the 21st century