Leveraging Crowds to Bridge Communication Barriers

Speaker:        Dr. Xiaojuan Ma
                Researcher
                Huawei Noah's Ark Lab

Title:          "Leveraging Crowds to Bridge Communication Barriers"

Date:           Monday, 30 September 2013

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theatre F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Human communication takes place in both spoken and written modes, as in
face-to-face conversations, Internet Browsing, etc. However, for people
with language disabilities, people with low literacy, and people with poor
command of a language, receiving and expressing information via a language
is difficult. Therefore, people seek alternative ways to communicate when
words fail.

In multimedia communication design, it is desirable for designers to gain
an understanding of how people will interpret their work. Traditional
methods, such as design critique, do not scale well when hundreds and even
thousands of design alternatives comprise a vast design space. We propose
a strategy that leverages collective judgments to help creating multimedia
representations to bridge language barriers. We integrate crowdsourced
evaluation with conventional design methods such as participatory design
and eye tracking. We demonstrate the efficacy of this method in three
different domains: augmentative and alternative communication for people
with language disorders, doctor-patient communication in medical care, and
design communication. We show that this strategy effectively measures the
communicative value of design alternatives, uncovers factors that can
influence design decisions, and supplements designers' intuition.


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Biography:

Xiaojuan Ma, Ph.D., is a researcher at Huawei Noah's Ark Lab. Before
joining Noah's Ark, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the
Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU),
and was awarded Computing Innovation Fellow by Computing Research
Association. Dr. Ma received her Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science
Department of Princeton University in 2010. She worked as a research
fellow in the Department of Information Systems, National University of
Singapore before joining CMU. Dr. Ma's background is in Human-Computer
Interaction. She is particularly interested in human computation and
crowdsourcing, multimedia-augmented communication support for both
human-human and human-robot interactions, design, visual/auditory
perception, and (computational) linguistics.