Kate Lockwood

The Value of Reputation on eBay: A Controlled Experiment

We conducted the first randomized controlled field experiment of an Internet reputation mechanism. A high-reputation, established eBay dealer sold matched pairs of lots—batches of vintage postcards—under his regular identity and under new seller identities (also operated by him). As predicted, the established identity fared better. The difference in buyers’ willingness-to-pay was 8.1% of the selling price. A subsidiary experiment followed the same format, but compared sales by relatively new sellers with and without negative feedback. Surprisingly, one or two negative feedbacks for our new sellers did not affect buyers’ willingness-to-pay. Copyright Economic Science Association 2006

CogSketch: Sketch Understanding for Cognitive Science Research and for Education

Sketching is a powerful means of working out and communicating ideas. Sketch understanding involves a combination of visual, spatial, and conceptual knowledge and reasoning, which makes it both challenging to model and potentially illuminating for cognitive science. This paper describes CogSketch, an ongoing effort of the NSF-funded Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center, which is being developed both as a research instrument for cognitive science and as a platform for sketch-based educational software. We describe the idea of open-domain sketch understanding, the scientific hypotheses underlying CogSketch, and provide an overview of the models it employs, illustrated by simulation studies and ongoing experiments in creating sketch-based educational software.

CogSketch: open-domain sketch understanding for cognitive science research and for education

In this paper, we describe CogSketch, an open-domain sketch understanding system built on the nuSketch architecture. CogSketch captures the multi-modal, unconstrained nature of sketching by focusing on reasoning over recognition. We describe this approach, as well as two application domains for CogSketch: cognitive modeling, and education.

Automatic Classification of Containment and Support Spatial Relations in English and Dutch

The need to communicate and reason about space is pervasive in human cognition. Consequently, most languages develop specialized terms for describing relationships between objects in space --- spatial prepositions. However, the specific set of prepositions and the delineations between them vary widely. For example, in English containment relationships are categorized as inand support relationships are classified as on. In Dutch, on the other hand, three different prepositions are used to distinguish between different types of support relations: op, aan, and om. In this paper we show how progressive alignment can be used to model the formation of spatial language categories along the containment-support continuum in both English and Dutch.

Multimodal knowledge capture from text and diagrams

Many information sources use multiple modalities, such as textbooks, which contain both text and diagrams. Each captures information that is hard to express in the other, and evidence suggests that multimodal information leads to better retention and transfer in human learners. This paper describes a system that captures textbook knowledge, using simplified English text and sketched versions of diagrams. We present experimental results showing it can use captured knowledge to answer questions from the textbooks curriculum.