Jeffrey V. Nickerson

The future of crowd work

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 future crowd workplace in which we would want our children to participate? This paper frames the major challenges that stand in the way of this goal. Drawing on theory from organizational behavior and distributed computing, as well as direct feedback from workers, we outline a framework that will enable crowd work that is complex, collaborative, and sustainable. The framework lays out research challenges in twelve major areas: workflow, task assignment, hierarchy, real-time response, synchronous collaboration, quality control, crowds guiding AIs, AIs guiding crowds, platforms, job design, reputation, and motivation.

An approach to fingerprint filter design

Abstract A procedure for filter design is described for enhancing fingerprint images. The procedure consists of five main steps: user-specification of appropriate image features, determination of local ridge orientations throughout the image, smoothing of this orientation image, pixel-by-pixel image enhancement by application of oriented, matched filter masks, and post-processing to reduce background and boundary noise. The contribution of this work is to quantify and justify the functional relationships between image features and filter parameters so that the design process can be easily modified for different conditions of noise and scale. Application of the filter shows good ridge separation and continuity, and background noise reduction.

Developing web services choreography standards: the case of REST vs. SOAP

This paper presents a case study of the development of standards in the area of cross-organizational workflows based on web services. We discuss two opposing types of standards: those based on SOAP, with tightly coupled designs similar to remote procedure calls, and those based on REST, with loosely coupled designs similar to the navigating of web links. We illustrate the standardization process, clarify the technical underpinnings of the conflict, and analyze the interests of stakeholders. The decision criteria for each group of stakeholders are discussed. Finally, we present implications for both the workflow and the wider Internet communities.

Constructing reality: A study of remote, hands-on, and simulated laboratories

Laboratories play a crucial role in the education of future scientists and engineers, yet there is disagreement among science and engineering educators about whether and which types of technology-enabled labs should be used. This debate could be advanced by large-scale randomized studies addressing the critical issue of whether remotely operated or simulation-based labs are as effective as the traditional hands-on lab format. The present article describes the results of a large-scale (N = 306) study comparing learning outcomes and student preferences for several different lab formats in an undergraduate engineering course. The lab formats that were evaluated included traditional hands-on labs, remotely operated labs, and simulations. Learning outcomes were assessed by a test of the specific concepts taught in each lab. These knowledge scores were as high or higher (depending on topic) after performing remote and simulated laboratories versus performing hands-on laboratories. In their responses to survey items, many students saw advantages to technology-enabled lab formats in terms of such attributes as convenience and reliability, but still expressed preference for hands-on labs. Also, differences in lab formats led to changes in group functions across the plan-experiment-analyze process: For example, students did less face-to-face work when engaged in remote or simulated laboratories, as opposed to hands-on laboratories.

Remote versus hands-on labs: a comparative study

Advocates of hands-on laboratories and advocates of simulation have debated for years. Proponents of hands-on laboratories argue that student engineers need to be exposed to the physical experiences-and the uncertainties-of real environments. Advocates of simulation argue that physical labs are wasteful-they tie up badly needed space, and consume students time in menial set-up and tear-down procedures. Now remote laboratories have appeared as a third option. These laboratories are similar to simulation techniques in that they require minimal space and time, because the experiments can be rapidly configured and run over the Internet. But unlike simulations, they provide real data. It is unknown what the relative effectiveness of hands-on, simulated, and remote laboratories is. This paper presents a model for testing this relative effectiveness, and discusses the results of a preliminary assessment study comparing versions of remote labs versus hands-on labs in a junior-level mechanical engineering course on machine dynamics and mechanisms.

Cooks or cobblers?: crowd creativity through combination

A sketch combination system is introduced and tested: a crowd of 1047 participated in an iterative process of design, evaluation and combination. Specifically, participants in a crowdsourcing marketplace sketched chairs for children. One crowd created a first generation of chairs, and then successive crowds created new generations by combining the chairs made by previous crowds. Other participants evaluated the chairs. The crowd judged the chairs from the third generation more creative than those from the first generation. An analysis of the design evolution shows that participants inherited and modified presented features, and also added new features. These findings suggest that crowd based design processes may be effective, and point the way toward computer-human interactions that might further encourage crowd creativity.

The ecology of standards processes: insights from internet standard making

In order to create Internet standards, people and ideas move across many institutions. By drawing upon the new institutionalism and on organizational ecology, we develop an ecological approach to studying this movement. The approach examines the birth and death of standards bodies and the ideas they cultivate. We apply the approach to the history of Web services choreography standards, in which over 500 participants traversed nine institutions during a 12-year period. We explain critical aspects of this history by analyzing patterns of movement of standardization ideas. We show that standard-making institutions refuse to legitimate standards by utilizing bylaws which reflect the values of the institution; these values reflect the design legacy of the Internet. We formulate conjectures about the dynamics of the birth and death of working groups inside larger institutions that form a population ecology. We discuss plausible explanations for why specific Internet standard-making efforts do not resolve quickly. The theoretical implication of the study is that an ecological approach will apply well to inventions that have been incubated, such as the Internet. The pragmatic implication is that changes to institutional Internet governance, particularly to the bylaws of standards bodies, can have drastic and unintended effects that will reshape the standard-making ecology.

Discovering context: classifying tweets through a semantic transform based on wikipedia

By mapping messages into a large context, we can compute the distances between them, and then classify them. We test this conjecture on Twitter messages: Messages are mapped onto their most similar Wikipedia pages, and the distances between pages are used as a proxy for the distances between messages. This technique yields more accurate classification of a set of Twitter messages than alternative techniques using string edit distance and latent semantic analysis.

A fix for fixation? rerepresenting and abstracting as creative processes in the design of information systems

Abstract Fixation prevents the associations that are bridges to new designs. The inability to see alternative solutions, or even to see how to map known solutions onto current problems, is a particularly acute problem in the design of software-intensive systems. Here, we explored two related ways of liberating fixated thinking: abstracting and rerepresenting. Although both techniques helped designers generate original ideas, not all the added ideas fit the problem constraints. We discuss ways the results might be used to generate reflective design aids that help designers to first generate original ideas and later prune them.

Matched filter design for fingerprint image enhancement

A procedure for filter design is described for enhancing fingerprint images. Four steps of this procedure are described: user specification of appropriate image features, determination of local ridge orientations throughout the image, smoothing of this orientation image, and pixel-by-pixel image enhancement by application of oriented, matched filter masks. The contribution of this work is to quantify and justify the functional relationships between image features and filter parameters so that the design process can be easily modified for different conditions of noise and scale. Application of the filter shows good ridge separation, continuity, and background noise reduction.<<ETX>>