Mary Lou Maher, Ph.D., is the Chair of the Department of Software and Information Systems in the College of Computing and Informatics at UNCC and was Deputy Director of the Information and Intelligent Systems Division and a Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2006-2010. Mary Lou’s research interests span a broad area of design and computing, specifically the study and development of novel interaction and communications technology, and models of design and creativity. Her research draws on and contributes to human-computer interaction, intelligent systems, computer-supported collaborative work, design science, and computational creativity.

Lecture abstract: Crowdsourcing design extends collaborative design by including the crowd: individuals that volunteer to participate without reference to their credentials or prescribing their role in the design. Effectively, this scales up the participation in the design process that introduces diversity and potentially incorrect contributions, and also leads to increased complexity in managing the design process.  Crowdsourcing has been successfully applied in various areas of graphic design, software design, and product design. This paper draws on those experiences and research in diversity, creativity, and motivation to present a model for crowdsourcing the design of a socio-technical system for a citizen science community. This lecture shows how the model of crowdsourcing design has been implemented in NatureNet, a citizen science project for collecting bio-diversity data in nature parks. The data collected from this crowdsourcing platform will be used to learn an agent model of crowdsourcing that can then be integrated as a mixed initiative collective intelligence to improve the quality of the bio-diversity data collected and the creativity of the design ideas.

Sponsor: this seminar is related to the International Collaboration Innovation Team Project of Tsinghua University (清华大学重点学科高水平国际合作创新团队支持项目)

Contact:  Hou Yuemin, Tel: 62773470