Recent citris_cc items

Blockchain, Digital Identity and Health Records: Considerations for Vulnerable Populations in California

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This report explores the overall potential of blockchain’s use in the public sector and focuses on two use cases that have received less attention: blockchain-based digital identity and health records management systems for the homeless and other vulnerable populations in California.

Blockchain in California: A Roadmap

Tue, 7 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Blockchain in California: A Roadmap

"A Drama in Time"�: How Data and Digital Tools are Transforming Cities and their Communities

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

"A Drama in Time"�: How Data and Digital Tools are Transforming Cities and their Communities

Makers’ Marks: Physical Markup for Designing and Fabricating Functional Objects

Thu, 7 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Makers’ Marks: Physical Markup for Designing and Fabricating Functional Objects

IoT & Sustainability: Practice, Policy and Promise

Wed, 29 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

IoT & Sustainability: Practice, Policy and Promise

M-CAFE 1.0: Motivating and Prioritizing Ongoing Student Feedback During MOOCs and Large on-Campus Courses using Collaborative Filtering

Thu, 5 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

During MOOCs and large on-campus courses with limited face-toface interaction between students and instructors, assessing and improving teaching effectiveness is challenging. In a 2014 study on course-monitoring methods for MOOCs [30], qualitative (textual) input was found to be the most useful. Two challenges in collecting such input for ongoing course evaluation are insuring student confidentiality and developing a platform that incentivizes and manages input from many students. To collect and manage ongoing (“just-in-time”) student feedback while maintaining student confidentiality, we designed the MOOC Collaborative Assessment and Feedback Engine (M-CAFE 1.0). This mobile-friendly platform encourages students to check in weekly to numerically assess their own performance, provide textual ideas about how the course might be improved, and rate ideas suggested by other students. For instructors, M-CAFE 1.0 displays ongoing trends and highlights potentially valuable ideas based...

DevCAFE 1.0: A participatory platform for assessing development initiatives in the field

Thu, 5 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The design and assessment of development initiatives is increasingly participatory, where decision makers consider feedback from affected populations. While digital data collection facilitates faster and more reliable analysis, existing data collection tools are not optimized for unstructured qualitative (textual) data and peer-to- peer participant collaboration. In this paper, we propose a system called the Development Collaborative Assessment and Feedback Engine version 1.0 (DevCAFE), a customizable participatory assessment platform that collects and integrates quantitative assessment, qualitative feedback and peer-to-peer collaborative filtering. DevCAFE incorporates a library of statistical analyses for researchers to quickly identify quantitative and qualitative trends while collecting field data. DevCAFE can run on any mobile device with a web-browser and can work with or without Internet connectivity. We present results from two pilot projects: (1) 137 participants evaluating...

Comparing Three Online Civic Engagement Platforms using the Spectrum of Public Participation.

Thu, 5 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Online civic engagement platforms accessed via desktops or mobile devices can provide new opportunities for the public to express views and insights, consider the views of others, assist in identifying innovative ideas and new approaches to public policy issues, and directly engage with elected leaders. Existing platforms vary widely in their approaches to: assessment, engagement, ideation, evaluation, and deliberation. We consider three online platforms: the Living Voters Guide, including its earlier iterations Consider.it and Reflect; the Open Town Hall; and the California Report Card. We compare them using the International Association of Public Participation’s “Spectrum of Public Participation” framework. Using a 10-point scale, we evaluate the user interface of each platform in terms of how well it supports the Spectrum’s levels of civic engagement (inform, consult, involve, collaborate, and empower). Results suggest how user interface design affects civic engagement and...

Lamello: Passive Acoustic Sensing for Tangible Input Components

Tue, 18 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

We describe Lamello, an approach for creating tangible in- put components that recognize user interaction via passive acoustic sensing. Lamello employs comb-like structures with varying-length tines at interaction points (e.g., along slider paths). Moving a component generates tine strikes; a real- time audio processing pipeline analyzes the resultant sounds and emits high-level interaction events. Our main contributions are in the co-design of the tine structures, information encoding schemes, and audio analysis. We demonstrate 3D printed Lamello-powered buttons, sliders, and dials.

Chatrooms in MOOCs: All talk and no action

Tue, 18 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

We study effects of introducing a real-time chatroom into a massive open online course with several thousand students, supplementing an existing forum. The chatroom was sup- ported by teaching assistants, and generated thousands of lines of discussion by 28% of 681 consenting chat condition participants, mostly on-topic. Despite this, chat activity re- mained low (μ = 8.2 messages per hour) and we could find no significant effect of chat use on objective or subjective de- pendent variables such as grades, retention, forum participa- tion, or students’ sense of community. Further investigation reveals that only 12% of chat participants have substantive interactions, while the remainder are either passive or have trivial interactions that are unlikely to result in learning.

We also find that pervasive, highly visible chat interfaces are highly effective in encouraging both active and substantive participation in chat. When compared to chat interfaces that are restricted...

Should Your MOOC Forum Use a Reputation System?

Tue, 18 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) rely primarily on discussion forums for interaction among students. We investigate how forum design affects student activity and learning outcomes through a field experiment with 1101 participants on the edX platform. We introduce a reputation system, which gives students points for making useful posts. We show that, as in other settings, use of forums in MOOCs is correlated with better grades and higher retention. Reputation systems additionally produce faster response times and larger numbers of responses per post, as well as differences in how students ask questions. However, reputation systems have no significant impact on grades, retention, or the students' subjective sense of community. This suggests that forums are essential for MOOCs, and reputation systems can improve the forum experience, but other techniques are needed to improve student outcomes and community formation. We also contribute a set of guidelines for running field experiments...

Almost an Expert: The Effects of Rubrics and Expertise on Perceived Value of Crowdsourced Design Critiques

Tue, 18 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Expert feedback is valuable but hard to obtain for many de- signers. Online crowds can provide a source of fast and affordable feedback, but workers may lack relevant domain knowledge and experience. Can expert rubrics address this issue and help novices provide expert-level feedback? To evaluate this, we conducted an experiment with a 2x2 facto- rial design. Student designers received feedback on a visual design artifact from both experts and novices, who produced feedback using either an expert rubric or no rubric. We found that rubrics helped novice workers provide feedback that was rated just as valuable as expert feedback. A follow-up analy- sis on writing style showed that student designers found feed- back most helpful when it was emotionally positive and spe- cific, and that providing a rubric increased the occurrence of these characteristics in feedback. The analysis also found that expertise correlated with longer critiques, but not the other fa- vorable characteristics....

Structuring, Aggregating, and Evaluating Crowdsourced Design Critique

Mon, 17 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Feedback is an important component of the design process, but gaining access to high-quality critique outside a classroom or firm is challenging. We present CrowdCrit, a webbased system that allows designers to receive design critiques from non-expert crowd workers. We evaluated CrowdCrit in three studies focusing on the designer’s experience and bene- fits of the critiques. In the first study, we compared crowd and expert critiques and found evidence that aggregated crowd critique approaches expert critique. In a second study, we found that designers who got crowd feedback perceived that it improved their design process. The third study showed that designers were enthusiastic about crowd critiques and used them to change their designs. We conclude with implications for the design of crowd feedback services.

Fabryq: Using Phones as Gateways to Prototype Internet of Things Applications Using Web Scripting

Mon, 17 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Ubiquitous computing devices are often size- and power-constrained, which prevents them from directly connecting to the Internet. An increasingly common pattern is therefore to interpose a smart phone as a network gateway, and to deliver GUIs for such devices. Implementing the pipeline from embedded device through a phone application to the Internet requires a complex and disjoint set of languages and APIs. We present fabryq, a platform that simplifies the prototyping and deployment of such applications. fabryq uses smartphones as bridges that connect devices using the short range wireless technology, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), to the Internet. Developers only write code in one language (Javascript) and one location (a server) to communicate with their device. We introduce aprotocol proxy programming model to control remote devices; and a capability-based hardware abstraction approach that supports scaling from a single prototype device to a deployment of multiple devices. To...

SceneSkim: Searching and Browsing Movies Using Synchronized Captions, Scripts and Plot Summaries

Mon, 17 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Searching for scenes in movies is a time-consuming but cru- cial task for film studies scholars, film professionals, and new media artists. In pilot interviews we have found that such users search for a wide variety of clips—e.g., actions, props, dialogue phrases, character performances, locations— and they return to particular scenes they have seen in the past. Today, these users find relevant clips by watching the entire movie, scrubbing the video timeline, or navigating via DVD chapter menus. Increasingly, users can also index films through transcripts—however, dialogue often lacks vi- sual context, character names, and high level event descrip- tions. We introduce SceneSkim, a tool for searching and browsing movies using synchronized captions, scripts and plot summaries. Our interface integrates information from such sources to allow expressive search at several levels of granularity: Captions provide access to accurate dialogue, scripts describe shot-by-shot actions and settings,...

Structuring Interactions for Large-Scale Synchronous Peer Learning

Mon, 17 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This research investigates how to introduce synchronous interactive peer learning into an online setting appropriate both for crowdworkers (learning new tasks) and students in massive online courses (learning course material). We present an interaction framework in which groups of learners are formed on demand and then proceed through a sequence of activities that include synchronous group discussion about learner-generated responses. Via controlled experiments with crowdworkers, we show that discussing challenging problems leads to better outcomes than working individually, and incentivizing people to help one another yields still better results. We then show that providing amini-lesson in which workers consider the principles underlying the tested concept and justify their answers leads to further improvements. Combining the mini-lesson with the discussion of the multiple-choice question leads to significant improvements on that question. We also find positive subjective responses...