Crouser, R. Jordan, and Remco Chang. “An affordance-based framework for human computation and human-computer collaboration.” Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on 18.12 (2012): 2859-2868.
Discussion leader: Javier Tibau
Summary
The authors surveyed the existing literature, from conferences in Visual Analytics, HCI and Visualization, identifying 49 papers representative of human-computer collaboration (HCC) in problem solving. In their analysis, they identify a set of affordances (both human and machine affordances), using them to describe the properties of two HCC projects (reCAPTCHA and PatViz). They urge for the adoption of this vocabulary as an effective way for studying and comparing the approaches by researchers in the area.
Reflection
The paper is a reproach on the (then) current state of research in HCC and related fields, where the many moves forwards are viewed (by the authors) as lacking a cohesive direction and vision. This is emphasized by the three questions that they claim are unanswerable in a systematic way:
– How do we tell if a problem would benefit from a collaborative technique?
– How do we decide which tasks to delegate to which party, and when?
– How does one system compare to others trying to solve the same problem?
(I believe this to be criticism of the field)
One memorable observation is that through affordances: researchers may move away from delegating tasks based on the deficiencies of each agent, to playing to the strengths of human and machine.
Interestingly, towards the end of the paper, they admit that even their affordance-based framework does not aid in tackling questions regarding the well-being of crowd workers.
Questions
- Why should we be concerned, in a field this young, about having good methodologies for evaluation of projects? Is it not enough to have successful experiences that illuminate ways forward?
- Why are affordances insufficient for understanding some crowdsourcing problems?
- What are some of the arguments presented against the use of crowdsourcing for problem solving?
