Jaime Teevan

Bringing the Wisdom of the Crowd to an Individual by Having the Individual Assume Different Roles

Groups of people tend to generate more diverse ideas than individuals because each group member brings a different perspective to the table. But while someone working alone can suffer from fixation and have difficulty of thinking outside-the-box, in this paper we show that it is possible to help them think more like a group by asking them to approach a problem from different perspectives. We present a study of 54 crowd workers in which some individual workers were asked to assume the role of various relevant experts while solving a problem. We find that participants who were asked to assume different roles came up with more creative ideas than those who were not. These findings suggest there is an opportunity for problem solving tools to bring the wisdom of the crowd to individuals.

The Science and Practice of Transitions

We tend to set ourselves up to thrive in a particular state while ignoring the transitions between states. But there is magic in the transitions; they are where unexpected and interesting things happen. There is an opportunity for our user interfaces to better support the transitions we make. In this talk I will share some of what I have learned from years of productivity research about how to successfully transition between tasks over the course of a day, and reflect on how these findings might be extended to help us understand how we, as academics and practitioners, can successfully transition through the various contexts and roles that we hold in a lifetime.

Session details: Industry Track Preface

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the SIGIR Symposium on Information Retrieval in Practice (SIRIP 2015). The goal of SIRIP is to bring together information retrieval researchers, practitioners, analysts, and consumers, and to achieve knowledge transfer across these boundaries. It is our hope that everyone who attends SIRIP walks away with new understanding and at least one new idea to think about or explore. SIRIP 2015 is held on the third day of the main SIGIR conference, on Wednesday, August 12, 2015, in Santiago, Chile. SIRIP is attended by people registered for the main conference as well as other interested practitioners who chose register for it alone. The SIRIP program consists of three hour and half long sessions that include a mix of invited presentations, refereed papers, and a panel presentation.