Monday, May 23, 2016

CFP for HCOMP 2016, deadline soon

The deadline for AAAI Conference on Human Computation (HCOMP) 2016 is nearly here.  It is an application domain where the depth and reasoning of theory CS folks might find unexpectedly rich outlet. You will see our folks deeply involved in organizing the conference including Arpita G, Sid S, Santosh V,  Jenn W. V, and others. 

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The theme for HCOMP 2016 is Interaction:
  • between people and technology that is foundational to human computation
  • between theoretical foundations, experimental work, and engineering
  • between the computational, scientific, and social applications of crowdsourcing
  • between diverse disciplines and perspectives, within our community and beyond
HCOMP strongly believes in inviting, fostering, and promoting broad, interdisciplinary research on crowdsourcing and human computation. Submissions may present principles, studies, and/or applications of systems that rely on programmatic interaction with crowds, or where human perception, knowledge, reasoning, or physical activity and coordination contributes to the operation of computational systems, applications, or services. More generally, we invite submissions from the broad spectrum of related fields and application areas including (but not limited to):

  • human-centered crowd studies: e.g., human-computer interaction, social computing, design, cognitive and behavioral sciences (psychology and sociology), management science, economics, policy, ethics, etc.
  • applications and algorithms: e.g., computer vision, cultural heritage, databases, digital humanities, information retrieval, machine learning, natural language (and speech) processing, optimization, programming languages, systems, etc.
  • crowdsourcing areas: e.g., citizen science, collective action, collective knowledge, crowdsourcing contests, crowd creativity, crowd funding, crowd ideation, crowd sensing, distributed work, freelancer economy, open innovation, microtasks, prediction markets, wisdom of crowds, etc.
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To ensure relevance, submissions are encouraged to include research questions and contributions of broad interest to crowdsourcing and human computation, as well as discuss relevant open problems and prior work in the field. When evaluation is conducted entirely within a specific domain, authors are encouraged to discuss how findings might generalize to other communities and application areas using crowdsourcing and human computation.
Full CFP is hereMay 31, 2016: Abstracts (for Full Papers) due. June 7, 2016: Full Papers due. 
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Sunday, May 22, 2016

Gaming in Practice

Here are 3 examples:

  • In Palo Alto, if you call a cab company (say pre-Uber), they take your information down, but if the ride is short and not lucrative, they call a different taxi company, pretend to be you, and provide them all your info and ask for a cab.  When that cab company comes to pick you up, everything works out because you dont really pay attention to one cab co vs another or what number you dialled. That is a handoff!
  • In Indonesia, creating a carpool lane created an industry where you can hire someone (even underage) to ride with you so you can use the fast lane.
  • In Whole Foods market, non-organic fruits are found very close to organic foods or even mistakenly in trays with organic labels, and sometimes where they "routinely" place organic fruits, you find non-organic ones. If someone mistakenly grabbed the non-organic ones, they may not notice even when they check out because  The only solution for a shopper is to look at each fruit and make sure it is organic (has PLU code of 5 digits starting with 9, for certified organic). And today I saw a honeydew melon with PLU 694034 that even the Internet doesnt seem to know. :)

Monday, May 16, 2016

Work Thoughts

There is so much talk on startup unicorns. In online advertising, we have mini-corns: they deal with x Billions of ad requests a day/week/month and make $$$ Millions of revenue, and there are several of them.

I was at a Big Data meeting and the discussion was about how to use Urban Sciences data to design and build better cities for the next few decades/century. I suggested that instead over the next few decades we should improve personal transportation so that we dont need high density urban areas and that we unlearn what humans learned a long time ago to congregate and find real estate where  first food production, and then industrial production concentrated. I suggested we forego the idea of owning personal real estate, just move from place to place, house to house when needed.


Nest Egg

Bringing a bird, nest and an egg to  a Tribeca rooftop: