Laura Dabbish

Designing games with a purpose

Data generated as a side effect of game play also solves computational problems and trains AI algorithms.

Social coding in GitHub: transparency and collaboration in an open software repository

Social applications on the web let users track and follow the activities of a large number of others regardless of location or affiliation. There is a potential for this transparency to radically improve collaboration and learning in complex knowledge-based activities. Based on a series of in-depth interviews with central and peripheral GitHub users, we examined the value of transparency for large-scale distributed collaborations and communities of practice. We find that people make a surprisingly rich set of social inferences from the networked activity information in GitHub, such as inferring someone elses technical goals and vision when they edit code, or guessing which of several similar projects has the best chance of thriving in the long term. Users combine these inferences into effective strategies for coordinating work, advancing technical skills and managing their reputation.

Email overload at work: an analysis of factors associated with email strain

This publication contains reprint articles for which IEEE does not hold copyright. Full text is not available on IEEE Xplore for these articles.

Understanding email use: predicting action on a message

Email consumes significant time and attention in the workplace. We conducted an organizational survey to understand how and why people attend to incoming email messages. We examined peoples ratings of message importance and the actions they took on specific email messages, based on message characteristics and characteristics of receivers and senders. Respondents kept half of their new messages in the inbox and replied to about a third of them. They rated messages as important if they were about work and required action. Importance, in turn, had a modest impact on whether people replied to their incoming messages and whether they saved them. The results indicate that factors other than message importance (e.g., their social nature) also determine how people handle email. Overall, email usage reflects attentional differences due both to personal propensities and to work demands and relationships.

Simplifying video editing using metadata

Digital video is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. However, editing video remains difficult for several reasons: it is a time-based medium, it has dual tracks of audio and video, and current tools force users to work at the smallest level of detail. Based on interviews with professional video editors, we developed a video editor, called Silver, that uses metadata to make digital video editing more accessible to novices. To help users visualize video, Silver provides multiple views with different semantic content and at different levels of abstraction, including storyboard, editable transcript, and timeline views. Silver offers smart editing operations that help users resolve the inconsistencies that arise because of the different boundaries in audio and video. We conducted a preliminary user study to investigate the effectiveness of the Silver smart editing. Participants successfully edited video after only a short tutorial, both with and without smart editing assistance. Our research suggests several ways in which video editing tools could use metadata to assist users in the reuse and composition of video.

Influence of social and technical factors for evaluating contribution in GitHub

Open source software is commonly portrayed as a meritocracy, where decisions are based solely on their technical merit. However, literature on open source suggests a complex social structure underlying the meritocracy. Social work environments such as GitHub make the relationships between users and between users and work artifacts transparent. This transparency enables developers to better use information such as technical value and social connections when making work decisions. We present a study on open source software contribution in GitHub that focuses on the task of evaluating pull requests, which are one of the primary methods for contributing code in GitHub. We analyzed the association of various technical and social measures with the likelihood of contribution acceptance. We found that project managers made use of information signaling both good technical contribution practices for a pull request and the strength of the social connection between the submitter and project manager when evaluating pull requests. Pull requests with many comments were much less likely to be accepted, moderated by the submitters prior interaction in the project. Well-established projects were more conservative in accepting pull requests. These findings provide evidence that developers use both technical and social information when evaluating potential contributions to open source software projects.

Are you close with me? are you nearby?: investigating social groups, closeness, and willingness to share

As ubiquitous computing becomes increasingly mobile and social, personal information sharing will likely increase in frequency, the variety of friends to share with, and range of information that can be shared. Past work has identified that whom you share with is important for choosing whether or not to share, but little work has explored which features of interpersonal relationships influence sharing. We present the results of a study of 42 participants, who self-report aspects of their relationships with 70 of their friends, including frequency of collocation and communication, closeness, and social group. Participants rated their willingness to share in 21 different scenarios based on information a UbiComp system could provide. Our findings show that (a) self-reported closeness is the strongest indicator of willingness to share, (b) individuals are more likely to share in scenarios with common information (e.g. we are within one mile of each other) than other kinds of scenarios (e.g. my location wherever I am), and (c) frequency of communication predicts both closeness and willingness to share better than frequency of collocation.

A multi-view intelligent editor for digital video libraries

Silver is an authoring tool that aims to allow novice users to edit di gital video. The goal is to make editing of digital video as easy as text editing. Silver provides multiple coordinated views, including project, source, outline, subject, storyboard, textual transcript and timeline views. Selections and edits in any view are synchronized with all other views. A variety of recognition algorithms are applied to the video and audio content and then are used to aid in the editing tasks. The Informedia Digital Library supplies the recognition algorithms and metadata used to support intelligent editing, and Informedia also provides search and a repository. The metadata includes shot boundaries and a time-synchronized transcript, which are used to support intelligent selection and intelligent cut/copy/paste.

Self-interruption on the computer: a typology of discretionary task interleaving

The typical information worker is interrupted every 12 minutes, and half of the time they are interrupting themselves. However, most of the research on interruption in the area of human-computer interaction has focused on understanding and managing interruptions from external sources. Internal interruptions -- user-initiated switches away from a task prior to its completion -- are not well understood. In this paper we describe a qualitative study of self-interruption on the computer. Using a grounded theory approach, we identify seven categories of self-interruptions in computer-related activities. These categories are derived from direct observations of users, and describe the motivation, potential consequences, and benefits associated with each type of self-interruption observed. Our research extends the understanding of the self-interruption phenomenon, and informs the design of systems to support discretionary task interleaving on the computer.

Increasing commitment to online communities by designing for social presence

The existence and survival of online communities depends upon the commitment and retention of their members. This paper compares alternative ways of designing online sites to increase member commitment. We report the results of two experiments conducted within a Facebook game application. The results show that designs can increase commitment and retention of players either by visually highlighting individual members, or by emphasizing the community as a whole. These designs influence commitment through different routes.