Yun Huang: Towards Building the Mobile Crowdsourcing Genome

Yun Huang, assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, will give the talk, "Towards Building the Mobile Crowdsourcing Genome."

Abstract: As a new model of social computing, crowdsourcing has been rapidly applied in different application domains over the past 10 years. In particular, the wide adoption of smart phones ushered in a proliferation of mobile crowdsourcing systems that promote a variety of location-based services. However, there is a lack of design principles for creating and evaluating such systems. In this talk, I will present a systematic framework, the mobile crowdsourcing genome, that addresses fundamental (e.g., what, who, why, how, where and when) questions pertaining to user contributions to mobile crowdsourcing systems. I will show examples of my systems work in public transit, public safety, and education domains. My research findings enrich the framework with a deeper understanding of: (1) how different location-related contexts impact user contributions to crowdsourcing systems; (2) how to leverage these contextual effects to design innovative social computing systems that can better engage users; and (3) how crowdsourced user behavioral data may help us better understand users and the community. 

At Syracuse University, Huang co-directs the SALT (Social Computing Systems) lab. Prior to joining Syracuse, she was a postdoctoral fellow of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. She received her PhD from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at University of California, Irvine. She earned her bachelor's degree from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Her work focuses on social computing systems research, in which she examines context-driven approaches of designing crowdsourcing systems. Her location-based sensing system has been used by more than 1000 students at Syracuse University for automatic class attendance taking; her online video learning system with crowdsourced captioning features has been used by hundreds of students at Syracuse University and will be used by 14 online courses in The State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF). Huang is the recipient of a Google Faculty Research Award, an NSF CRII award, an NSF iCorps award, an iConference Best Paper Award and a CHI best paper nomination. In addition, she has three ongoing projects funded by IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) and NIDILRR (National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research).