Hao-Chuan Wang

From diversity to creativity: stimulating group brainstorming with cultural differences and conversationally-retrieved pictures

Group brainstorming, or collaboratively generating ideas through idea sharing, demands diverse contributions to spark more ideas and improve creativity. One approach to supporting group brainstorming is to introduce conceptual diversity. In this study, we evaluate the effects of two sources of diversity on group brainstorming: cultural differences internal to multicultural groups and pictures related to the conversation retrieved by a computer agent. The pictures generally enhanced performance as measured by both originality and diversity of ideas. The pictures also helped to convert cultural diversity into a creative outcome, the diversity of ideas generated. We argue that with appropriate technology mediation, cultural diversity may be used strategically to enhance task outcomes.

Same translation but different experience: the effects of highlighting on machine-translated conversations

Machine translation (MT) has the potential to allow members of multilingual organizations to interact via their own native languages, but issues with the quality of MT output have made it difficult to realize this potential. We hypothesized that highlighting keywords in MT output might make it easier for people to overlook translation errors and focus on what was intended by the message. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a laboratory experiment in which native English speakers interacted with a Mandarin-speaking confederate using machine translation. Participants performed three brainstorming tasks, under each of three conditions: no highlighting, keyword highlighting, and random highlighting. Our results indicated that people consider the identical messages clearer and less distracting when the keywords in the message are highlighted. Keyword highlighting also improved subjective impressions of the partner and the quality of the collaboration. These findings inform the design of future communication tools to support multilingual communications.

Thinking hard together: the long and short of collaborative idea generation in scientific inquiry

Idea generation is a cognitive process that plays a central role in inquiry learning tasks. This paper presents results from a controlled experiment in which we investigate the affect on productivity and learning from doing idea generation tasks individually versus in pairs, with versus without automatic support from a virtual brainstorming agent called VIBRANT. Our finding is that individuals brainstorming with VIBRANT produced more ideas than individuals who brainstormed with a human peer. However, an additional finding is that while brainstorming in pairs lead to short term process losses in terms of idea generation, with a corresponding reduction in learning in terms of pre to post test gains, it produced a productivity gain for a subsequent distinct individual inquiry task. Furthermore, automatically generated feedback from VIBRANT improved learning during idea generation but did not mitigate the process losses that were associated with reduced learning in the pairs conditions.

Agent-based dynamic support for learning from collaborative brainstorming in scientific inquiry

This paper seeks to contribute new insight to the process of learning during idea generation (i.e., brainstorming) by proposing and evaluating two alternative operationalizations for learning, which we refer to as connection-based learning and multi-perspective learning, during a carefully designed idea-generation task in the earth-sciences domain. Specifically, this paper presents two controlled experiments. In the first study we manipulate two independent factors, first whether students work individually or in pairs, and second whether students work with the VIBRANT agent or not. The second study includes one additional hybrid agent condition motivated by results from the first study as well as other enhancements to the VIBRANT agent’s discussion-analysis technology. Our finding is that while brainstorming in pairs leads to short-term process losses in terms of idea-generation productivity, with a corresponding reduction in connection-based learning, it produces a gain in multi-perspective learning. Furthermore, automatically generated feedback from VIBRANT improves connection-based learning. In the second study, support from an enhanced version of VIBRANT showed evidence of mitigating the process losses that were associated with reduced learning in the pairs condition of the first study.

Groups in groups: conversational similarity in online multicultural multiparty brainstorming

Online collaboration, in comparison to face-to-face collaboration, is advantageous in making multiparty teamwork possible at a very low cost. As multicultural multiparty collaboration becomes ubiquitous, it is crucial to understand how communication processes are shaped in the social and media environments that computer-mediated communication affords. We conducted a laboratory study investigating how different types of cultural asymmetry in group composition (Chinese of the majority versus American of the majority) and communication media (text-only versus video-enabled chatroom) influence conversational similarity between Chinese and Americans. The paper presents an analysis identifying that the selection of media and the cultural composition of the group jointly shape intercultural conversational closeness.

A Collaborative Support Tool for Creativity Learning: Idea Storming Cube

Creativity plays an important role in many learning activities but how to enhance creativity with the support of modern computer tools deserves further studies. In this paper, we propose a game-based collaborative creativity support system called Idea storming cube to support creative thinking and help a user form a perspective-shift thinking habit. The system analyzes the knowledge acquired from the history of user inputs and compares it with the ideas possessed by the domain expert and other users in the current brainstorming group. The system is designed to provide user-, goal- and context-sensitive supports with this mechanism that stimulates more divergent thinking. We have implemented the proposed game with a magic-cube-like HCI for collaborative idea generation. A case study for preliminary evaluation of the system is also reported in this paper.

Investigating and predicting social and visual image interestingness on social media by crowdsourcing

Not all images are interesting to people. People are drawn by interesting images and ignore tasteless ones. Image interestingness has the importance no less than other subjective image properties that have received significant research interest, but has not been systematically studied before. In this work we focus on visual and social aspects of image interestingness. We rely on crowdsourcing tools to survey human perceptions for these subjective properties and verify data by analyzing consistency and reliability. We show that people have an agreement when deciding if an image is interesting or not. We examine the correlation between the social, visual aspects of interestingness and aesthetics. By exploring the correlation, we find that: (1) Weak correlation between social interestingness and both of visual interestingness and image aesthetics indicates that the images frequently re-shared by people are not necessarily aesthetic or visually interesting. (2) High correlation between image aesthetics and visual interestingness implies aesthetic images are more likely to be visually interesting to people. Then we wonder what features of an image lead to social interestingness, e.g. receiving more likes and shares on social networking sites? We train classifiers to predict visual and social interestingness and investigate the contribution from different image features. We find that social and visual interestingness can be best predicted with color and texture, respectively, providing a way to manipulate social and visual liking of images with image features. Further, we investigate the correlation between social/visual image interestingness and image color. We find that colors with arousal effect show more frequently in images with higher social interestingness. That could be explained by previous studies for activation-related affect of colors and provides useful and important advice when advertising on social networking sites.

VIBRANT: a brainstorming agent for computer supported creative problem solving

This paper describes key issues underlying the design of a tutoring system that brainstorms with students in order to support qualitative problem solving. Cognitively oriented and socially oriented support are enabled by two technologies, namely heuristic-based feedback generation and community-data-driven social recommendation. Formal representations and corresponding automated reasoning procedures for these technologies are introduced.

Supporting second language reading with picture note-taking

Second language reading is difficult when people are with limited second language proficiency. In this paper, we proposed picture note-taking, displaying semantic-related pictures as notes of keywords in an article to support second language reading comprehension. We prototyped an online reading tool called PicRemarkable and evaluated its effects on English reading with Chinese native speakers. Our result showed that participants performed better at the delay comprehension test when using picture note-taking as support than using Chinese definitions of words as support.

De-virtualizing social events: understanding the gap between online and offline participation for event invitations

One growing use of computer-based communication media is for gathering people to initiate or sustain social events. Although the use of computer-mediated communication and social network sites such as Facebook for event promotion is becoming popular, online participation in an event does not always translate to offline attendance. In this paper, we report on an interview study of 31 participants that examines how people handle online event invitations and what influences their online and offline participation. The results show that peoples event participation is shaped by their social perceptions of the events nature (e.g., public or private), their relationships to others (e.g., the strength of their connections to other invitees), and the medium used to communicate event information (e.g., targeted invitation via email or spam communication via Facebook event page). By exploring how people decide whether to participate online or offline, the results illuminate the sophisticated nature of the mechanisms that affect participation and have design implications that can bridge virtual and real attendance.