Stanford Scholar Initiative: Collaborative Video Production at Scale - Research Talks and Technical Topics
Collaborators: Sharad Goel, Amin Saberi at Stanford University. Over 800 students worldwide.

There are millions of research papers that go unread, some are behind paywall, while some are hard for non-researchers to read and understand. Besides writing papers, researchers lack time and resources to make their work available in other forms or formats. Meanwhile, there's been a shift in consuming information and knowledge through videos. Through this initiative, we're trying to make world's research more accessible - by mobilizing people worldwide to scale the traditional video creation process, and collaboratively create short talks on influential papers - that can be improved/edited by anyone. To accomplish this goal, we're designing a scaffolding process to coordinate the crowd, and building a system to enable collaborative and editable video production. Beyond research talks, we're applying our techniques to develop courses. Eventually, this research can help open-ended media collaboration - from education to journalism, and beyond.

Updates and Publication

- [Paper] Vaish, R., Goyal, S., Saberi, A., Goel, S. "Creating Crowdsourced Research Talks at Scale", WWW 2018, Lyon, France.
- [Paper] Vaish, R., Goel, S., Saberi, A. "Mobilizing the Crowd To Create an Open Repository of Research Talks", ACM Learning@Scale 2017 (Work-in-Progress), MIT, Cambridge, MA.
- [Talk] Stanford Postdoc Research Symposium, 12/6/2016.
- [Numbers] 1000+ strong community, 115,000+ views, 150+ videos.
- [Progress] 8 research talks completed, based on best papers at WWW 2015 and WWW 2016.
- [Progress] 4 short courses completed, in multiple languages.
- [Talk] Social Computing Lab, Stanford University, 5/23/16.

Testimonials

- "I had always wanted to read through research papers on hot topics of computer science. But I could never get started. This program not only inspires me to read through a paper but requires me to understand it enough, so as to create a talk on it. And learning is always fun when more people are learning with us." - from a student from India.
- "Thanks again for your efforts on our behalf. You and your team are providing a great public service to science." - from a professor from Kellogg School of Management, U. Penn.
- "The talk is extremely thorough despite its brevity. Its certainly better than the talk I gave at WWW." - from a researcher at Wikimedia Research, San Francisco, CA.
- "Thank you so much for the reference and opportunity to join this initiative Rajan. I’ve been taking courses for so long but being able to create my own and help out with education was very special to me." - a high school student who recently got accepted to Stanford's class of 2021.

The Whodunit Challenge: Mobilizing the Crowd in India
Collaborators: Bill Thies and Ed Cutrell at Microsoft Research India. Aditya Vashistha at University of Washington.

While there has been a surge of interest in mobilizing the crowd to solve large-scale time-critical challenges, to date such work has focused on high income countries and Internet-based solutions. In developing countries, approaches for crowd mobilization are often broader and more diverse, utilizing not only the Internet but also face-to-face and mobile communications. The Whodunit Challenge is first of its kind social mobilization contest to be launched in India. The contest enabled participation via basic mobile phones and required rapid formation of large teams in order to solve a fictional mystery case. The challenge encompassed 7,700 participants in a single day and was won by a university team in about 5 hours. To understand teams strategies and experiences, we conducted 84 phone interviews. While the Internet was an important tool for most teams, in contrast to prior challenges we also found heavy reliance on personal networks and offline communication channels.

Publication

- Vashistha, A, Vaish, R, Cutrell, E, Thies, W; “The Whodunit Challenge: Mobilizing the Crowd in India”; INTERACT 2015, Bamberg, Germany. (Equal contributions by Vashistha and Vaish).

Press - sadly, few links are not live anymore

- Microsoft to test social tech in India, Times of India, 2/13
- Microsofts social Whodunit competition to begin in India, Yahoo! News, 2/13
- From Computing Research to Surprising Inventions (Peter Lee, head of MSR, launching the Whodunit? Challenge at TechFest India), Microsoft Research, 2/13
- Microsoft India Announces A Nationwide Social Gaming Competition, Silicon India, 1/13
- Social whodunnit competition launches in India, NewScientist, 1/13
- More press by Business Standard, CNN IBN, ACM.org, IIIT-Delhi and more...

Twitch Crowdsourcing: Crowd Contributions in Short Bursts of Time
Collaborators: Michael Bernstein, Keith Wyngarden, Jingshu Chen, Brandon Cheung at Stanford University.

To lower the threshold to participation in crowdsourcing, we present twitch crowdsourcing: crowdsourcing via quick contributions that can be completed in one or two seconds. We introduce Twitch, a mobile phone application that asks users to make a micro-contribution each time they unlock their phone. Twitch takes advantage of the common habit of turning to the mobile phone in spare moments. Twitch crowdsourcing activities span goals such as authoring a census of local human activity, rating stock photos, and extracting structured data from Wikipedia pages. At the time of CHI’14 paper submission, 82 users made 11,240 crowdsourcing contributions as they used their phone in the course of everyday life. After six months of deployment, over 100,000 contributions were registered. The median Twitch activity took just 1.6 seconds, incurring no statistically distinguishable costs to unlock speed or cognitive load compared to a standard slide-to-unlock interface.

Publication

- Vaish, R, Wyngarden, K, Cheung, B, Bernstein, M. “Twitch Crowdsourcing: Crowd Contributions in Short Bursts of Time”, CHI’14, Toronto, Canada.

Talks, Posters, Press and Achievements

- [Talk] Stanford University HCI lunch, 6/19/13
- [Talk] MIT CSAIL, 7/16/13
- [Talk and poster] Stanford MobiSocial Retreat, 10/5/13 http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/retreat13/
- [Poster] UC Santa Cruz Research Review Day, 10/17/13
- [Press] What’s new in digital and social media research: Crowdsourcing, analytics, Twitter patterns, product ratings, Harvards Journalists Resource, 5/14
- [Press] The Next Frontier in Crowdsourcing: Your Smartphone, MIT Technology Review, 3/14
- [Press] Crowdswiping, Stanford The Dish Daily, 2/14
- [Press] Crowdsourcing with a swipe of your finger, Santa Cruz Sentinal/San Jose Mercury, 2/14
- [Press] Crowdsourcing Twitch app could turn swipes into cash, NewScientist, 1/14
- [Achievement] Michael Bernstein was awarded the Google Faculty Grant for Twitch crowdsourcing proposal.

Exploring employment opportunities through microtasks via cybercafés
Collaborators: James Davis at U.C. Santa Cruz. Mrunal Gawade at Centrum Wiskunde “Exploring Employment Opportunities through Microtasks via Cybercafés”; IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference 2012, Seattle, WA.
- Gawade, M, Vaish, R, Waihumbu, M. N, Davis, J; “Exploring microwork opportunities through cybercafes”; ACM DEV 2012, Atlanta, GA. Work-in-progress.

Poster and Achievements

- [Achievement] Semi-finalist at the UC Berkeley Global Social Venture Competition 2012.
- [Poster] UC Berkeley CITRIS Retreat 2013, Berkeley, CA.

Internet vs. Enterprise Crowdfunding: Contrasting Motivations and Dynamics
Collaborators: Michael Muller, Werner Geyer and Todd Soule at IBM T.J. Watson Research, Cambridge, MA.

In this project we contrast crowdfunding as it occurs on the Internet, with crowdfunding in an Enterprise setting, based on a grounded theory analysis of a crowdfunding trial at IBM Research Almaden. We explore themes of diverse projects, motivations and incentives, strategies and approaches, and collaborations and relationships. Enterprise crowdfunding has its own financial model, social scope, and dynamics, resulting from a heightened sense of collaboration and community. This project helps us learn about the implications for organizations and for future crowdfunding activities.

Publication

- Vaish, R, Muller, M, Geyer, W, Soule, T. “Crowdfunding in the Enterprise and on the Internet: Workplace Users Emphasize Collaboration and Sociality”, Research Report RC25535, IBM Research 2015.

Talk, Poster and Press

- [Talk and Poster] InternFest’13, IBM Research, Cambridge, MA.
- [Press] IBM discovers its inner Kickstarter via enterprise crowdfunding, Network World, 8/13.
- [Press] Can Internal Crowdfunding Help Companies Surface Their Best Ideas?, Harvard Business Review, 9/13.

Peerworthy: Motivating Participation in Prosocial Peer-to-Peer Services
Collaborators: Victoria Bellotti at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Vera Liao at Univ. at Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Internet is embracing peer-to-peer services, and the "sharing economy" they create. This project aims at exploring how to motivate people to join prosocial p2p services that do not involve monetary rewards. We carried out qualitative studies with users of existing online P2P services and offline peer-production groups to uncover A wide range of motivations. We conducted a field experiment with a P2P curating platform we created to compare user recruiting strategies that leverage these motivatiors. A full paper is under submission at International Journal of Human-Computer Studies.

Publication

- Vaish, R, Liao, Q. V., Bellotti, V. "What’s in it for me? Self-serving versus other-oriented framing in messages advocating use of prosocial peer-to-peer services", Elsevier International Journal of Human-Computer Studies V109.

Talk and Poster

- [Talk] Palo Alto Research Center, 10/14
- [Poster] Palo Alto Research Center, 7/14
- Publication under review for Elsevier International Journal of Human-Computer Studies.

Crowd-Powered Tone Improvement System for Emails
Collaborators: Andrés Monroy-Hernández and Jaime Teevan at Microsoft Research Redmond.

Communicating a message with right tone is extremely important, misinterpretation of which can cause confusion or unexpected reaction and response. However, people often fail to express the right tone in their messages due to a lack of skills or the wrong assumptions. Can we help them? There are several automated solutions to detect the tone and identify shortcomings, like IBM's Tone Analyzer and ToneCheck. However, their accuracy and reliability if often doubtful. Also, these applications can give recommendations, but cannot fix the tone of the message or text. As part of our project, our system relies on crowd intelligence to improve the tone of emails. The backend of our system is powered by MTurk, where crowd follows a systematically designed and scaffolded workflow. The system inputs email content and context, and outputs improved email. Based on a study on 29 emails, we found that more than 90\% of the emails went through some or significant improvements.

Talk and Publication

- [Talk] Microsoft Research Redmond, 9/15
- [Paper] Vaish, R, Monroy-Hernández, A. "CrowdTone: Crowd-powered tone feedback and improvement system for emails", MSR-TR-2017-1. Also, available on ArXiV.

Other projects from my grad school at U.C. Santa Cruz
3D+2D TV: 3D Displays with No Ghosting for Viewers Without Glasses
3D displays are increasingly popular in consumer and commercial applications. Many such displays show 3D images to viewers wearing special glasses, while showing an incomprehensible double image to viewers without glasses. We demonstrate a simple method that provides those with glasses 3D experience, while viewers without glasses see a 2D image without artifacts.
3D+2D TV project home site, SIGGRAPH site

Digitization of Health Records in Rural Villages- with PAMF
In this project, we present a study that reviews current available methods for obtaining electronic health records (EHRs) to facilitate the provision of health services to patients from rural villages in developing countries. The study compares processes of digitizing health records by means of manual transcription, both by hiring a professional transcriptionist and by using online crowdsourcing platforms. Finally, a cost-benefit analysis is conducted to compare the studied transcription methods to an alternate technology-based solution that was developed to support in-the-field direct data entry.

Using crowdsourcing to generate ground truth data for computer vision training
This project was conducted in collaboration with LANL. Computer vision is great, but at times it fails too. To train the algorithms, usually researchers spend several hours annotating images to create ground truths. Why not harness the crowd here? That’s what we’re trying to do, several experiments have been crowdsourced on Mechanical Turk and MobileWorks. The experiment was conducted on two types of data sets, namely: Pedestrians and Bumble-bees.

Low Effort Crowdsourcing: Leveraging Peripheral Attention for Crowd Work - at CrowdCamp at HCOMP'13, with Jeff Bigham and Haoqi Zhang.
Crowdsourcing systems leverage short bursts of focusedattention from many contributors to achieve a goal. Byrequiring people’s full attention, existing crowdsourcingsystems fail to leverage people’s cognitive surplus in themany settings for which they may be distracted, performingor waiting to perform another task, or barely payingattention. In this project, we study opportunities for loweffortcrowdsourcing that enable people to contribute toproblem solving in such settings. We discuss the designspace for low-effort crowdsourcing, and through a seriesof prototypes, demonstrate interaction techniques, mechanisms,and emerging principles for enabling low-effortcrowdsourcing

Before grad school: Older projects and stuff - Class projects, OLPC project, OpenStreetMap project, Yahoo! Open Hack, NASA WorldWind add-on, AOL/Truveo Google Gadges, Microsoft Imagine Cup etc.

Publications and Patents

- Organisciak, P, Vaish, R. "Accomplishing low-attention microtasks", Productivity Decomposed: Getting Big Things Done with Little Microtasks, ACM CHI Workshop 2016, San Jose, CA.
- Scher, S, Liu, J, Vaish, R, Gunawardane, P, Davis, J. “3D+2DTV: 3D Displays with No Ghosting for Viewers without Glasses”, ACM Transaction on Graphics (TOG) 2012.
- Vaish, R, Ishikawa, S, Liu, J, Berkey, S, Strong, P, Davis, J. “Digitization of Health Records in Rural Villages”, IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference 2013, San Jose, CA.
- Vaish, R, Ishikawa, S, Lundquist, S, Porter, R, Davis, J. “Human Computation for Object Detection”, Tech Report UCSC-SOE-15-03, School of Engineering, University of California Santa Cruz.
- Vaish, R, Organisciak, P, Hara, K, Bigham, J, Zhang, H. “Low-effort Crowdsourcing: leveraging peripheral attention for crowd work”, AAAI HCOMP 2014, Pittsburgh, PA [Work-in-progress and Demo].
- James Davis, Steven Scher, Jing Liu, Rajan Vaish, Prabath Gunawardane, "Simultaneous 2D and 3D Images on a Display”, US Patent 2013032821; 2013.

Press

- 3D+2D TV: A 3D display that’s watchable without glasses, without ghosting, Extreme Tech, 6/13.
- UCSC Researchers Develop Display for Both 3D, 2D Viewing, India West, 10/13
- 3D TV faces uncertain future, MSN, 8/13.
- Researchers Develop Ghost-Free 3D For Viewers Not Wearing Glasses, Gizmodo, 7/13.
- UCSC Researchers Develop 3D Display With No Ghosting for Viewers Without Glasses, ACM Comm., 7/13.

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