The Computing Innovation Fellows Project

Posted on: Wednesday, May 5th, 2010
Broad Research Area: HCI / CSCW, Social Computing / Social Informatics

Research Interests:

I am interested in working with CIFellows in two areas: human computation and computing education.

1) Human Computation: An enormous potential exists for solving certain classes of computational problems through rich collaboration between humans and computers. Currently, countless open computer science problems remain in artificial intelligence, computer vision, and natural language processing. While we continue to work towards completely automating these tasks, for many real-world problems we need an approach today that offers a high quality, inexpensive, and scalable solution.

I am looking for a post-doc that can help build and study systems, help develop a deeper understanding of human participation and the quality of their contribution. I am working in the area of translation, motivated by the need to translate thousands of books from my International Children’s Digital Library project (www.childrenslibrary.org), but expect to broaden the scope to include other domains. I am also interested in developing mobile forms of human participation to reach people where they are.

2) Computing Education: Introductory (and advanced for that matter) computer science students spend a significant amount of their learning time writing programs for class assignments. In recent years, a trend has been to make these programming assignments graphical and interactive in order to make them engaging and show the potential of computers. This has been a positive factor in the recruitment of women, minorities and those students not as interested in computing for its own sake. I propose to go one step further by supporting competitive and cooperative multi-player games among students with the goal of leveraging student’s strong social interests.

Most existing computing competitions (i.e. Netflix, programming contests, TREC, VAST, etc.) are based on having a single input where each competitor produces a solution, runs it against the input, and uses a metric to determine a ranking of winners. Instead, I am building a generic, scalable, gaming engine that lets student write simple independent programs that can compete with each other. I already have deployed it to our freshman programming course this semester in the form of competitive two-player games, but now I’d like to broaden it to include simulations, social and creative systems to have broader reach – and to formally study it to understand how it affects student work.

Contact Information:

Contact info at http://www.cs.umd.edu/~bederson