Lydia Chilton, Juho Kim, Paul André, Felicia Cordeiro, James A. Landay, Daniel S. Weld, Steven P. Dow, Robert C. Miller, Haoqi Zhang
Discussion Leader: Divit Singh
Summary
In a conference, similar papers are usually organized into sessions. This is done so that conference attendees can see related talks in the same time-block. The process of organizing papers into these sessions is nontrivial. This paper offers a different approach in order to aid the process of grouping papers into sessions. This paper presents Frenzy: a web application designed to leverage the distributed knowledge of the program committee to rapidly group papers into sessions. This application breaks session-making into 2 sub-problems: meta-data elicitation and global constraint satisfaction. In the meta-data elicitation stage, users search for papers via queries on their abstracts/authors etc. and group them into categories that they believe makes sense. They also have the ability to “+1” categories that have been suggested by other users to show support for that category. In the global constraint satisfaction stage, users must assign a paper to a session and also make sure that every session contains at least two papers in it. The author(s) tested this application at CSCW 2014 PC meeting and the schedule produced for the CSCW 2014 was generated with the aid of Frenzy.
Reflection
The idea of leveraging parallelism to create sessions for a conference is a brilliant one. This paper mentioned that this process used to take an entire day and that the even then, the schedulers were usually pidgeon-holed into deciding which session a paper belonged to (in order to fulfill constraints). By creating a web application that allows all users access to the data, I believe that they created an extremely useful and efficient system. The only downside I see to this application is that I fear that they may give users too much power. For example, users may delete categories. I’m not sure that giving users this type of power would be wise. For the purposes of a conference, where all users are educated and have a clear sense of the goal, it may be okay. However, if they were to open up this system to a wider audience, this system may backfire.
I really liked how they divided up their process into sub-problems. From my understanding, the first stage is to get a general sense as to where these papers belong and to get some user feedback to show where the majority of users believe the appropriate category for a paper should be. This stage is open to the entire audience so that everyone may contribute and have a say. The second stage is thought to be more of a “clean-up” stage. A special subset from the committee members then make the final choices as to deciding papers for session. Now, they are provided with the thoughts of the overall group, which greatly help in deciding where papers go. In my head, I viewed this approach as a map-reduce job. The metaphor may be a stretch, but I viewed the first stage, they are just trying to “map” a paper to the best possible category. This task happens in parallel and it generates an increasing set of results. The second stage, “reduces” these sets and delegates them into their appropriate sessions. For those reasons, reading through this paper, it was pretty interesting how they were able to pull this off. Apart from the information-intense UI that they provided for their web application, they did an excellent job in simplifying the tasks enough to produce valid results.
Questions
- The interface that Frenzy has contains a lot of jam-packed information. Do you think as a user of this system, you would understand everything that was going on?
- The approach used by Frenzy breaks the problem of conference session making into 2 problems: meta-data elicitation and session constraint satisfaction. Do you think that these two problems are to broad and can be broken down into further sub-problems?
- This system gives the power to “delete” categories. How do you make sure that a category that is valid is not deleted by a user? Can this system be used on a group that is larger than a conference committee? Ex: MTurk?
