Crowdsourcing for Engineering Design: Objective Evaluations and Subjective Preferences

Crowdsourcing enables designers to reach out to large numbers of people who may not have been previously considered when designing a new product, listen to their input by aggregating their preferences and evaluations over potential designs, aiming to improve ``good'' and catch ``bad'' design decisions during the early-stage design process. This approach puts human designers--be they industrial designers, engineers, marketers, or executives--at the forefront, with computational crowdsourcing systems on the backend to aggregate subjective preferences (e.g., which next-generation Brand A design best competes stylistically with next-generation Brand B designs?) or objective evaluations (e.g., which military vehicle design has the best situational awareness?). These crowdsourcing aggregation systems are built using probabilistic approaches that account for the irrationality of human behavior (i.e., violations of reflexivity, symmetry, and transitivity), approximated by modern machine learning algorithms and optimization techniques as necessitated by the scale of data (millions of data points, hundreds of thousands of dimensions). This dissertation presents research findings suggesting the unsuitability of current off-the-shelf crowdsourcing aggregation algorithms for real engineering design tasks due to the sparsity of expertise in the crowd, and methods that mitigate this limitation by incorporating appropriate information for expertise prediction. Next, we introduce and interpret a number of new probabilistic models for crowdsourced design to provide large-scale preference prediction and full design space generation, building on statistical and machine learning techniques such as sampling methods, variational inference, and deep representation learning. Finally, we show how these models and algorithms can advance crowdsourcing systems by abstracting away the underlying appropriate yet unwieldy mathematics, to easier-to-use visual interfaces practical for engineering design companies and governmental agencies engaged in complex engineering systems design.PhDDesign ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133438/1/aburnap_1.pd

Big and broad social data and the sociological imagination : A collaborative response

We wish to thank the UK Economic and Social Research Council (grant numbers ES/K008013/1 and ES/J009903/1), the National Centre for Research Methods, the Digital Social Research programme and the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (Digital Infrastructure Research Tools Programme) for funding this work.In this paper, we reflect on the disciplinary contours of contemporary sociology, and social science more generally, in the age of 'big and broad' social data. Our aim is to suggest how sociology and social sciences may respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by this 'data deluge' in ways that are innovative yet sensitive to the social and ethical life of data and methods. We begin by reviewing relevant contemporary methodological debates and consider how they relate to the emergence of big and broad social data as a product, reflexive artefact and organizational feature of emerging global digital society. We then explore the challenges and opportunities afforded to social science through the widespread adoption of a new generation of distributed, digital technologies and the gathering momentum of the open data movement, grounding our observations in the work of the Collaborative Online Social Media ObServatory (COSMOS) project. In conclusion, we argue that these challenges and opportunities motivate a renewed interest in the programme for a 'public sociology', characterized by the co-production of social scientific knowledge involving a broad range of actors and publics.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Marketing cabbage /

no.1242 (1924

Marketing onions /

no.1325 (1925

A service oriented infrastructure to facilitate trust in collaborative working

There is currently a significant interest in the use of a pay-per-use charging model for using software services. A primary concern for a software or resource owner when considering this approach to software exposure is security, and in particular – trust. The resource owner must be confident in the knowledge that users accessing their software have fine-grained access restrictions applied to them controlling the varying levels of access to the software a user may be granted. Similarly, a client executing a service on a remote site must trust the administrator of the site to deliver a timely and accurate result (and possibly proprietary data sent to the site). Existing Virtual Organisation (VO) management tools use centralized servers that handle role management, user authentication and access control, essentially this is the trusted centre of a VO. Resource owners trust this central server and its manager to allow access to their machines and resources based on role privileges assigned within the VO. In this paper, it is proposed that a distributed and automated software management application based on a service oriented infrastructure would allow software owners to provide a Web Services interface to their own software, suggesting an alternative and distributed approach to role based management across organisational boundaries