Enhancing Creativity as Innovation via Asynchronous Crowdwork

Synchronous, face-to-face interactions such as brainstorming are considered essential for creative tasks (the old normal). However, face-to-face interactions are difficult to arrange because of the diverse locations and conflicting availability of people - a challenge made more prominent by work-from-home practices during the COVID-19 pandemic (the new normal). In addition, face-to-face interactions are susceptible to cognitive interference. We employ crowdsourcing as an avenue to investigate creativity in asynchronous, online interactions. We choose product ideation, a natural task for the crowd since it requires human insight and creativity into what product features would be novel and useful. We compare the performance of solo crowd workers with asynchronous teams of crowd workers formed without prior coordination. Our findings suggest that, first, crowd teamwork yields fewer but more creative ideas than solo crowdwork. The enhanced team creativity results when Second, cognitive interference, known to inhibit creativity in face-to-face teams, may not be significant in crowd teams. Third, teamwork promotes better achievement emotions for crowd workers. These findings provide a basis for trading off creativity, quantity, and worker happiness in setting up crowdsourcing workflows for product ideation. </p

BFF: A tool for eliciting tie strength and user communities in social networking services

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1007/s10796-013-9453-6The use of social networking services (SNSs) such as Facebook has explosively grown in the last few years. Users see these SNSs as useful tools to find friends and interact with them. Moreover, SNSs allow their users to share photos, videos, and express their thoughts and feelings. However, users are usually concerned about their privacy when using SNSs. This is because the public image of a subject can be affected by photos or comments posted on a social network. In this way, recent studies demonstrate that users are demanding better mechanisms to protect their privacy. An appropriate approximation to solve this could be a privacy assistant software agent that automatically suggests a privacy policy for any item to be shared on a SNS. The first step for developing such an agent is to be able to elicit meaningful information that can lead to accurate privacy policy predictions. In particular, the information needed is user communities and the strength of users' relationships, which, as suggested by recent empirical evidence, are the most important factors that drive disclosure in SNSs. Given the number of friends that users can have and the number of communities they may be involved on, it is infeasible that users are able to provide this information without the whole eliciting process becoming confusing and time consuming. In this work, we present a tool called Best Friend Forever (BFF) that automatically classifies the friends of a user in communities and assigns a value to the strength of the relationship ties to each one. We also present an experimental evaluation involving 38 subjects that showed that BFF can significantly alleviate the burden of eliciting communities and relationship strength.This work has been partially supported by CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 under grant CSD2007-00022, and TIN 2008-04446 and PROMETEO II/2013/019 projects. 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Toward an Ethical Framework for Smart Cities and the Internet of Things

As smart cities increasingly become real, an ethical framework for them becomes increasingly necessary. Surprisingly, current approaches largely disregard such a framework and concentrate primarily on challenges pertaining to the data lifecycle. However, a smart city involves much more than data gathering: it involves the interactions of residents, businesses, and government agencies with respect to public and private resources subject to potentially subtle regulations and other norms. This article introduces a sociotechnical view of smart cities and shows how it may be profitably mapped to the moral foundation theory to provide a comprehensive ethical framework.</p