Completing A Crowdsourcing Task Instead Of An Assignment; What Do University Students Think?

University educators actively seek realistic projects to include in their educational activities. However, finding an actually realistic project is not trivial. The rise of crowdsourcing platforms, in which a variety of tasks are offered in the form of an open call, might be an alternative source to help educators scaleup project-based learning. But how do university students feel about executing crowdsourcing tasks instead of their typical assignments? In a study with 24 industrial design students, we investigate students\u27 attitudes on introducing crowdsourcing tasks as assignments. Based on our study we offer four suggestions to universities that consider integrating crowdsourcing tasks in their educational activities

Crowd of oz : A crowd-powered social robotics system for stress management

Coping with stress is crucial for a healthy lifestyle. In the past, a great deal of research has been conducted to use socially assistive robots as a therapy to alleviate stress and anxiety related problems. However, building a fully autonomous social robot which can deliver psycho-therapeutic solutions is a very challenging endeavor due to limitations in artificial intelligence (AI). To overcome AI’s limitations, researchers have previously introduced crowdsourcing-based teleoperation methods, which summon the crowd’s input to control a robot’s functions. However, in the context of robotics, such methods have only been used to support the object manipulation, navigational, and training tasks. It is not yet known how to leverage real-time crowdsourcing (RTC) to process complex therapeutic conversational tasks for social robotics. To fill this gap, we developed Crowd of Oz (CoZ), an open-source system that allows Softbank’s Pepper robot to support such conversational tasks. To demonstrate the potential implications of this crowd-powered approach, we investigated how effectively, crowd workers recruited in real-time can teleoperate the robot’s speech, in situations when the robot needs to act as a life coach. We systematically varied the number of workers who simultaneously handle the speech of the robot (N = 1, 2, 4, 8) and investigated the concomitant effects for enabling RTC for social robotics. Additionally, we present Pavilion, a novel and open-source algorithm for managing the workers’ queue so that a required number of workers are engaged or waiting. Based on our findings, we discuss salient parameters that such crowd-powered systems must adhere to, so as to enhance their performance in response latency and dialogue quality. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Formal representation of ambulatory assessment protocols in HTML5 for human readability and computer execution

Ambulatory assessment (AA) is a research method that aims to collect longitudinal biopsychosocial data in groups of individuals. AA studies are commonly conducted via mobile devices such as smartphones. Researchers tend to communicate their AA protocols to the community in natural language by describing step-by-step procedures operating on a set of materials. However, natural language requires effort to transcribe onto and from the software systems used for data collection, and may be ambiguous, thereby making it harder to reproduce a study. Though AA protocols may also be written as code in a programming language, most programming languages are not easily read by most researchers. Thus, the quality of scientific discourse on AA stands to gain from protocol descriptions that are easy to read, yet remain formal and readily executable by computers. This paper makes the case for using the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) to achieve this. While HTML can suitably describe AA materials, it cannot describe AA procedures. To resolve this, and taking away lessons from previous efforts with protocol implementations in a system called TEMPEST, we offer a set of custom HTML5 elements that help treat HTML documents as executable programs that can both render AA materials, and effect AA procedures on computational platforms.</p

"Get off my lawn!": Starting to understand territoriality in location based mobile games

With the increasing popularity of mobile video games, game designers and developers are starting to integrate geolocation information into such games. Although popular location-based games (LBGs) such as Ingress and Pokémon Go have millions of users, research still needs to be carried out to fully understand the ways in which such games impact upon a player’s interaction with other players and their physical surroundings. Consequently, there is limited knowledge on how user behavior can be addressed and drawn upon as a design resource to further engage and motivate players to play. To further understand this, we developed a LBG called CityConqueror and have conducted an in ’the wild’ study. This initial study starts to unpack the ways that human territoriality can be expressed in LBGs to facilitate player motivation, engagement and can support the integration of the game in the player’s daily life. Based on our findings we propose a series of design implications for LBGs. The primary purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the importance of territoriality and the way that this can be drawn upon as a resource for design

Capturing the City’s Heritage On-the-Go: Design Requirements for Mobile Crowdsourced Cultural Heritage

Intangible Cultural Heritage is at a continuous risk of extinction. Where historical artefacts engine the machinery of intercontinental mass-tourism, socio-technical changes are reshaping the anthropomorphic landscapes everywhere on the globe, at an unprecedented rate. There is an increasing urge to tap into the hidden semantics and the anecdotes surrounding people, memories and places. The vast cultural knowledge made of testimony, oral history and traditions constitutes a rich cultural ontology tying together human beings, times, and situations. Altogether, these complex, multidimensional features make the task of data-mapping of intangible cultural heritage a problem of sustainability and preservation. This paper addresses a suggested route for conceiving, designing and appraising a digital framework intended to support the conservation of the intangible experience, from a user and a collective-centred perspective. The framework is designed to help capture the intangible cultural value of all places exhibiting cultural-historical significance, supported by an extensive analysis of the literature. We present a set of design recommendations for designing mobile apps that are intended to converge crowdsourcing to Intangible Cultural Heritage

Expected Information Needs of Parents for Pervasive Awareness Systems

Abstract. This paper examines the communication needs of busy parents that can be served by awareness systems: systems supporting a continuous and semi-automated flow of information about the activities of communicating individuals. We report an online survey involving 69 participants. This survey focused on whether the types of information offered by awareness systems as these are introduced in current research literature are appreciated by busy parents. The results show a) that information items that allow personalization and expressing intentionality are more desired than those than low granularity and automatically sensed information that is easy to collect automatically b) the attitudes regarding the information that people wish to share about themselves is almost identical to what they wish to know of their partners and c) survey methods focusing on information do not need to differentiate between the direction of information flow or whether this is symmetric, since people report almost identical preferences

Locating Identities in Time: An examination of the Impact of Temporality on Presentations of the Self through Location-based Social networks

Studies of identity and location-based social networks (LBSN) have tended to focus on the performative aspects associated with marking one’s location. Yet, these studies often present this practice as being an a priori aspect of locative media. What is missing from this research is a more granular understanding of how this process develops over time. Accordingly, we focus on the first six weeks of 42 users beginning to use an LBSN we designed and named GeoMoments. Through our analysis of our users\u27 activities, we contribute to understanding identity and LBSN in two distinct ways. First, we show how LBSN users develop and perform self-identity over time. Second, we highlight the extent these temporal processes reshape the behaviors of users. Overall, our results illustrate that while a performative use of GeoMoments does evolve, this development does not occur in a vacuum. Rather, it occurs within the dynamic context of everyday life, which is prompted, conditioned, and mediated by the way the affordances of GeoMoments digitally organize and archive past locational traces

In Their Shoes: A Structured Analysis of Job Demands, Resources, Work Experiences, and Platform Commitment of Crowdworkers in China

Despite the growing interest in crowdsourcing, this new labor model has recently received severe criticism. The most important point of this criticism is that crowdworkers are often underpaid and overworked. This severely affects job satisfaction and productivity. Although there is a growing body of evidence exploring the work experiences of crowdworkers in various countries, there have been a very limited number of studies to the best of our knowledge exploring the work experiences of Chinese crowdworkers. In this paper we aim to address this gap. Based on a framework of well-established approaches, namely the Job Demands-Resources model, the Work Design Questionnaire, the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory, the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, and the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire, we systematically study the work experiences of 289 crowdworkers who work for ZBJ.com - the most popular Chinese crowdsourcing platform. Our study examines these crowdworker experiences along four dimensions: (1) crowdsourcing job demands, (2) job resources available to the workers, (3) crowdwork experiences, and (4) platform commitment. Our results indicate significant differences across the four dimensions based on crowdworkers\u27 gender, education, income, job nature, and health condition. Further, they illustrate that different crowdworkers have different needs and threshold of demands and resources and that this plays a significant role in terms of moderating the crowdwork experience and platform commitment. Overall, our study sheds light to the work experiences of the Chinese crowdworkers and at the same time contributes to furthering understandings related to the work experiences of crowdworkers

Does location congruence matter? : A field study on the effects of location-based advertising on perceived ad intrusiveness, relevance &amp; value

We investigate the effect of location-congruent mobile messages on perceived intrusiveness, value, and relevance through a field experiment using the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). We developed a mobile application for undergraduate students, featuring campus news and information concerning class schedules. This application also included daily ads for the University restaurant, which were either location-(semi)congruent or location-incongruent. Immediately after viewing the ads the app presented a short questionnaire to the participants for a period of four weeks, thereby measuring their perceived intrusiveness, relevance and value of these ads. During these four weeks daily ads were sent to 40 students, resulting in 107 responses from 23 participants. The results show that our participants perceived location-(semi)congruent ads as significantly more valuable and relevant, whereas no significant results were found for perceived intrusiveness. By investigating LBA in a field-study based on ESM utilizing participants’ own smartphone devices this study corroborates the presumed effects of location-(semi)congruency on marketing relevant ad perceptions.</p

Unfolding the interplay of self-identity and expressions of territoriality in location-based social networks

Self-identity in mobile location-based social networks (LBSN) is a relatively underexplored topic. In this paper, we present our initial understandings on the role that LBSN play in the self-identity of its users and introduce a relationship between self-identity and expressions of territoriality in LBSN. Our work presented in this paper is based on a six-week study using a novel LBSN called GeoMoments. Our primary purpose is to draw attention to the importance of potential perceived power facilitated by identity claims over an area, and to the temporal nature of the layered meanings of physical places in LBSN so they can be drawn upon as a resource for design