Aniket Kittur's research while affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University and other places
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Publications (119)
People spend a significant amount of time trying to make sense of the internet, collecting content from a variety of sources and organizing it to make decisions and achieve their goals. While humans are able to fluidly iterate on collecting and organizing information in their minds, existing tools and approaches introduce significant friction into...
Reviewing the literature to understand relevant threads of past work is a critical part of research and vehicle for learning. However, as the scientific literature grows the challenges for users to find and make sense of the many different threads of research grow as well. Previous work has helped scholars to find and group papers with citation inf...
Consumers conducting comparison shopping, researchers making sense of competitive space, and developers looking for code snippets online all face the challenge of capturing the information they find for later use without interrupting their current flow. In addition, during many learning and exploration tasks, people need to externalize their mental...
Analogies have been central to creative problem-solving throughout the history of science and technology. As the number of scientific papers continues to increase exponentially, there is a growing opportunity for finding diverse solutions to existing problems. However, realizing this potential requires the development of a means for searching throu...
Exposure to ideas in domains outside a scientist's own may benefit her in reformulating existing research problems in novel ways and discovering new application domains for existing solution ideas. While improved performance in scholarly search engines can help scientists efficiently identify relevant advances in domains they may already be familia...
Analogies have been central to creative problem-solving throughout the history of science and technology. As the number of scientific papers continues to increase exponentially, there is a growing opportunity for finding diverse solutions to existing problems. However, realizing this potential requires the development of a means for searching throu...
What science does, what science could do, and how to make science work? If we want to know the answers to these questions, we need to be able to uncover the mechanisms of science, going beyond metrics that are easily collectible and quantifiable. In this perspective piece, we link metrics to mechanisms by demonstrating how emerging metrics of scien...
The ever-increasing pace of scientific publication necessitates methods for quickly identifying relevant papers. While neural recommenders trained on user interests can help, they still result in long, monotonous lists of suggested papers. To improve the discovery experience we introduce multiple new methods for \em augmenting recommendations with...
Developers perform online sensemaking on a daily basis, such as researching and choosing libraries and APIs. Prior research has introduced tools that help developers capture information from various sources and organize it into structures useful for subsequent decision-making. However, it remains a laborious process for developers to manually ident...
What is scientific knowledge, and how is it created, accumulated, transformed, and used? If we want to know the answers to these questions, we need to be able to uncover the structures and mechanisms of science, in addition to the metrics that are easily collectable and quantifiable. In this review article, we link metrics to mechanisms, by demonst...
Crowdsourced labor markets represent a powerful new paradigm for accomplishing work. Understanding the motivating factors that lead to high quality work could have significant benefits. However, researchers have so far found that motivating factors such as increased monetary reward generally increase workers’ willingness to accept a task or the spe...
As the amount of information online continues to grow, a correspondingly important opportunity is for individuals to reuse knowledge which has been summarized by others rather than starting from scratch. However, appropriate reuse requires judging the relevance, trustworthiness, and thoroughness of others' knowledge in relation to an individual's g...
Web-scale repositories of products, patents and scientific papers offer an opportunity for creating automated systems that scour millions of ideas and assist users in discovering inspirations and solutions. Yet the common representation of ideas is in the form of raw textual descriptions, lacking important structure that is required for supporting...
As the amount of information online continues to grow, a correspondingly important opportunity is for individuals to reuse knowledge which has been summarized by others rather than starting from scratch. However, appropriate reuse requires judging the relevance, trustworthiness, and thoroughness of others' knowledge in relation to an individual's g...
Conducting an effective literature review is an essential step in all scientific work. However, the process is difficult, particularly for interdisciplinary work. Here, we articulate a key avenue for improvement for literature review tools: supporting the appropriate unit of interaction, which we argue is a "grounded claim", a concise statement lin...
Developers spend a significant portion of their time searching for solutions and methods online. While numerous tools have been developed to support this exploratory process, in many cases the answers to developers' questions involve trade-offs among multiple valid options and not just a single solution. Through interviews, we discovered that devel...
Whether figuring out where to eat in an unfamiliar city or deciding which apartment to live in, consumer generated data (i.e. reviews and forum posts) are often an important influence in online decision making. To make sense of these rich repositories of diverse opinions, searchers need to sift through a large number of reviews to characterize each...
Analogy—the ability to find and apply deep structural patterns across domains—has been fundamental to human innovation in science and technology. Today there is a growing opportunity to accelerate innovation by moving analogy out of a single person’s mind and distributing it across many information processors, both human and machine. Doing so has t...
Scientific discoveries are often driven by finding analogies in distant domains, but the growing number of papers makes it difficult to find relevant ideas in a single discipline, let alone distant analogies in other domains. To provide computational support for finding analogies across domains, we introduce SOLVENT, a mixed-initiative system where...
The availability of large idea repositories (e.g., patents) could significantly accelerate innovation and discovery by providing people inspiration from solutions to analogous problems. However, finding useful analogies in these large, messy, real-world repositories remains a persistent challenge for both humans and computers. Previous approaches i...
People engaged in complex searches such as planning a vacation or understanding their medical symptoms are often overwhelmed by opening and managing many tabs. These challenges are exacerbated as search moves to smartphones and mobile devices where screen real-estate is limited and tasks are frequently suspended, resumed, and interleaved. Rather th...
Finding analogical inspirations in distant domains is a powerful way of solving problems. However, as the number of inspirations that could be matched and the dimensions on which that matching could occur grow, it becomes challenging for designers to find inspirations relevant to their needs. Furthermore, designers are often interested in exploring...
Sensemaking is a common activity in the analysis of a large or complex amount of information. This active area of HCI research asks how DO people come to understand such difficult sets of information? The information workplace is increasing dominated by high velocity, high volume, complex information streams. At the same time, understanding how sen...
Finding analogical inspirations in distant domains is a powerful way of solving problems. However, as the number of inspirations that could be matched and the dimensions on which that matching could occur grow, it becomes challenging for designers to find inspirations relevant to their needs. Furthermore, designers are often interested in exploring...
The human mind remains an unparalleled engine of innovation, with its unique ability to make sense of complex information and find deep analogical connections driving progress in science and technology over the past millennia. The recent explosion of online information available in virtually every domain should present an opportunity for accelerati...
The availability of large idea repositories (e.g., the U.S. patent database) could significantly accelerate innovation and discovery by providing people with inspiration from solutions to analogous problems. However, finding useful analogies in these large, messy, real-world repositories remains a persistent challenge for either human or automated...
The availability of large idea repositories (e.g., the U.S. patent database) could significantly accelerate innovation and discovery by providing people with inspiration from solutions to analogous problems. However, finding useful analogies in these large, messy, real-world repositories remains a persistent challenge for either human or automated...
Cognitive neuroscience aims to map mental processes onto brain function, which begs the question of what "mental processes" exist and how they relate to the tasks that are used to manipulate and measure them. This topic has been addressed informally in prior work, but we propose that cumulative progress in cognitive neuroscience requires a more sys...
Patients researching medical diagnoses, scientist exploring new fields of literature, and students learning about new domains are all faced with the challenge of capturing information they find for later use. However, saving information is challenging on mobile devices, where the small screen and font sizes combined with the inaccuracy of finger ba...
Friendsourcing consists of broadcasting questions and help requests to friends on social networking sites. Despite its potential value, friendsourcing requests often fall on deaf ears. One way to improve response rates and motivate friends to undertake more effortful tasks may be to offer extrinsic rewards, such as money or a gift, for responding t...
Crowdsourced clustering approaches present a promising way to harness deep semantic knowledge for clustering complex information. However, existing approaches have difficulties supporting the global context needed for workers to generate meaningful categories, and are costly because all items require human judgments. We introduce Alloy, a hybrid ap...
Crowdsourcing offers a powerful new paradigm for online work. However, real world tasks are often interdependent, requiring a big picture view of the difference pieces involved. Existing crowdsourcing approaches that support such tasks -- ranging from Wikipedia to flash teams -- are bottlenecked by relying on a small number of individuals to mainta...
Online communities, much like companies in the business world, often need to transfer âbest practicesâ internally from one unit to another to improve their performance. Organizational scholars disagree about how much a recipient unit should modify a best practice when incorporating it. Some evidence indicates that modifying a practice that has...
Previous work has shown the promise of crowdsourcing analogical idea generation, where distributing the stages of analogical processing across many people can reduce fixation, identify inspirations from more diverse domains, and lead to more creative ideas. However, prior work has only considered problems with a single constraint, while many real-w...
People are more creative at solving difficult design problems when they use relevant examples from outside of the problemâs domain as inspirations. However, finding such “outside-the-box” inspirations is difficult, particularly in large idea repositories such as the web, because without guidance people select domains to search based on surface si...
Learning about a new area of knowledge is challenging for novices partly because they are not yet aware of which topics are most important. The Internet contains a wealth of information for learning the underlying structure of a domain, but relevant sources often have diverse structures and emphases, making it hard to discern what is widely conside...
Low-cost genetic sequencing, coupled with novel social media platforms and visualization techniques, present a new frontier for scientific participation, whereby people can learn, share, and act on data embedded within their own bodies. Our study of 23andMe, a popular genetic testing service, reveals how users make sense of and contextualize their...
Over the last several years there has been an explosion of powerful, affordable, multi-touch devices. This provides an outstanding opportunity for novel data visualization techniques that leverage new interaction methods and minimize their barriers to entry. In this paper we describe an approach for multivariate data visualization that uses physics...
Harnessing crowds can be a powerful mechanism for increasing innovation. However, current approaches to crowd innovation rely on large numbers of contributors generating ideas independently in an unstructured way. We introduce a new approach called distributed analogical idea generation, which aims to make idea generation more effective and less re...
If the people belong to multiple online communities, their joint membership can influence the survival of each of the communities to which they belong. Communities with many joint memberships may struggle to get enough of their members' time and attention, but find it easy to import best practices from other communities. In this paper, we study the...
Seeking solutions from one domain to solve problems in another is an effective process of innovation. This process of analogy searching is difficult for both humans and machines. In this paper, we present a novel approach for re-presenting a problem in terms of its abstract structure, and then allowing people to use this structural representation t...
Distributed online groups have great potential for generating interdependent and complex products like encyclopedia articles or product design. However, coordinating multiple group members to work together effectively while minimizing process losses remains an open challenge. We conducted an experiment comparing the effectiveness of two coordinatio...
People spend an enormous amount of time searching for complex information online; for example, consumers researching new purchases or patients learning about their conditions. As they search, people build up rich mental schemas about their target domains; which, if effectively shared, could accelerate learning for others with similar interests. In...
In modern crowdsourcing markets, requesters face the challenge of training and managing large transient workforces. Requesters can hire peer workers to review others' work, but the value may be marginal, especially if the reviewers lack requisite knowledge. Our research explores if and how workers learn and improve their performance in a task domai...
Analysts synthesize complex, qualitative data to uncover themes and concepts, but the process is time-consuming, cognitively taxing, and automated techniques show mixed success. Crowdsourcing could help this process through on-demand harnessing of flexible and powerful human cognition, but incurs other challenges including limited attention and exp...
The Internet has the potential to accelerate scientific problem solving by engaging a global pool of contributors. Existing approaches focus on broadcasting problems to many independent solvers. We investigate other approaches that may be advantageous by examining a community for mathematical problem solving -- MathOverflow -- in which contributors...
A significant challenge for crowdsourcing has been increasing worker engagement and output quality. We explore the effects of social, learning, and financial strategies, and their combinations, on increasing worker retention across tasks and change in the quality of worker output. Through three experiments, we show that 1) using these strategies to...
The objective of the paper is to understand leadership in an online community, specifically, Wikipedia.
Wikipedia successfully aggregates millions of volunteers' efforts to create the largest encyclopedia in human history. Without formal employment contracts and monetary incentives, one significant question for Wikipedia is how it organizes individ...
In this video we show TouchViz, a software system for visualizing multivariate data that harnesses the physical, embodied nature of tablet computers and physical models such as gravity and force to allow users to explore data along many dimensions at once. Data are represented as actual physical objects that can be manipulated through user touches,...
In this paper we describe TouchViz, an information visualization system for tablets that encourages rich interaction, exploration, and play through references to physical models. TouchViz turns data into physical objects that experience forces and respond to the user. We describe the design of the system and conduct a user study to explore its use,...
One of the most significant challenges for many online communities is increasing members' contributions over time. Prior studies on peer feedback in online communities have suggested its impact on contribution, but have been limited by their correlational nature. In this paper, we conducted a field experiment on Wikipedia to test the effects of dif...
People spend an enormous amount of time searching for and saving information online. Existing tools capture only a small portion of the cognitive processing a user engages in while making sense of a new domain. In this paper we introduce a novel interface for capturing online information in a structured but lightweight way. We use this interface as...
In this paper we describe TouchViz, an information visualization system for tablets that encourages rich interaction, exploration, and play through references to physical models. TouchViz turns data into physical objects that experience forces and respond to the user. We describe the design of the system.
Paid crowd work offers remarkable opportunities for improving productivity, social mobility, and the global economy by engaging a geographically distributed workforce to complete complex tasks on demand and at scale. But it is also possible that crowd work will fail to achieve its potential, focusing on assembly-line piecework. Can we foresee a fut...
Large-scale collaboration systems often separate their content from the deliberation around how that content was produced. Surfacing this deliberation may engender trust in the content generation process if the deliberation process appears fair, well-reasoned, and thorough. Alternatively, it could encourage doubts about content quality, especially...
We (the authors of CSCWs program) have finite time and energy that can be invested into our publications and the research communities we value. While we want our work to have the most impact possible, we also want to grow and support productive research communities within which to have this impact. This panel discussion explores the costs and benef...
Crowdsourcing has become a powerful paradigm for accomplishing work quickly and at scale, but involves significant challenges in quality control. Researchers have developed algorithmic quality control approaches based on either worker outputs (such as gold standards or worker agreement) or worker behavior (such as task fingerprinting), but each app...
A challenge for many online production communities is to direct their members to accomplish tasks that are important to the group, even when these tasks may not match individual members' interests. Here we investigate how combining group identification and direction setting can motivate volunteers in online communities to accomplish tasks important...
The field of collective intelligence - encompassing aspects of crowdsourcing, human computation, and social computing - is having tremendous impact on our lives, and the fields are rapidly growing. We propose a hands-on event that takes the main benefits of a workshop - provocative discussion and community building - and allows time to focus on dev...
Existing methods for searching and exploring large document collections focus on surface-level matches to user queries, ignoring higher-level semantic structure. In this paper we show how topic modeling - a technique for identifying latent themes across a large collection of documents - can support semantic exploration. We present TopicViz: an inte...
We examine the possibility of distributed sensemaking: improving a user's sensemaking by leveraging previous users' work without those users directly collaborating or even knowing one another. We asked users to engage in sensemaking by organizing and annotating web search results into "knowledge maps," either with or without previous users' maps to...
According to an old English saying, “one bad apple spoils the whole barrel. ” In online communities there’s some truth to this notion. A stalker, thief, troll, or impersonator can ruin the community experience for the majority of members who respect the intent of the site and the feelings of others. Misbehavior need not be illegal to be destructive...
Wikipedia's remarkable success in aggregating millions of contributions can pose a challenge for current editors, whose hard work may be reverted unless they understand and follow established norms, policies, and decisions and avoid contentious or proscribed terms. We present a machine learning model for predicting whether a contribution will be re...
Though toolkits exist to create complex crowdsourced workflows, there is limited support for management of those workflows. Managing crowd workers and tasks requires significant iteration and experimentation on task instructions, rewards, and flows. We present CrowdWeaver, a system to visually manage complex crowd work. The system supports the crea...
Traditional research on leadership in online communities has consistently focused on the small set of people occupying leadership roles. In this paper, we use a model of shared leadership, which posits that leadership behaviors come from members at all levels, not simply from people in high-level leadership positions. Although every member can exhi...
When people explore and manage information, they think in terms of topics and
themes. However, the software that supports information exploration sees text
at only the surface level. In this paper we show how topic modeling -- a
technique for identifying latent themes across large collections of documents
-- can support semantic exploration. We pre...
Detecting and correcting low quality submissions in crowdsourcing tasks is an important challenge. Prior work has primarily focused on worker outcomes or reputation, using approaches such as agreement across workers or with a gold standard to evaluate quality. We propose an alternative and complementary technique that focuses on the way workers wor...
Micro-task markets such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk represent a new paradigm for accomplishing work, in which employers can tap into a large population of workers around the globe to accomplish tasks in a fraction of the time and money of more traditional methods. However, such markets typically support only simple, independent tasks, such as label...
Social production systems such as Wikipedia rely on attracting and motivating volunteer contributions to be successful. One strong demotivating factor can be when an editor's work is discarded, or "reverted", by others. In this paper we demonstrate evidence of this effect and design a novel interface aimed at improving communication between the rev...
Reverts are important to maintaining the quality of Wikipedia. They fix mistakes, repair vandalism, and help enforce policy. However, reverts can also be damaging, especially to the aspiring editor whose work they destroy. In this research we analyze 400,000 Wikipedia revisions to understand the effect that reverts had on editors. We seek to unders...
Cognitive neuroscience aims to map mental processes onto brain function, which begs the question of what "mental processes" exist and how they relate to the tasks that are used to manipulate and measure them. This topic has been addressed informally in prior work, but we propose that cumulative progress in cognitive neuroscience requires a more sys...
We present APOLO, a system that uses a mixed-initiative approach to help people interactively explore and make sense of large network datasets. It combines visualization, rich user interaction and machine learning to engage the user in bottom-up sensemaking to gradually build up an understanding over time by starting small, rather than starting big...
Extracting useful knowledge from large network datasets has become a fundamental challenge in many domains, from scientific literature to social networks and the web. We introduce Apolo, a system that uses a mixed-initiative approach - combining visualization, rich user interaction and machine learning - to guide the user to incrementally and inter...
In this paper, we introduce a method to measure shared leadership in Wikipedia as a step in developing a new model of online leadership. We show that editors with varying degrees of engagement and from peripheral as well as central roles all act like leaders, but that core and peripheral editors show different profiles of leadership behavior. Speci...
Although science is becoming increasingly collaborative, there are remarkably few success stories of online collaborations between professional scientists that actually result in real discoveries. A notable exception is the Polymath Project, a group of mathematicians who collaborate online to solve open mathematics problems. We provide an in-depth...
Crowdsourcing and human computation are transforming human-computer interaction, and CHI has led the way. The seminal publication in human computation was initially published in CHI in 2004 [1], and the first paper investigating Mechanical Turk as a user study platform has amassed over one hundred citations in two years [5]. However, we are just be...