Alex Quinn

Human Computation

My current work aims to develop richer ways of combining human power with computer power to solve a broad class of AI problems (i.e. natural language processing, computer vision, etc.). I'm especially interested in how you can use this to solve big, messy problems. The work is ongoing.

Quinn, A. J., Bederson, B. B., Yeh, T., Lin, J.  CrowdFlow: Integrating Machine Learning with Mechanical Turk for Speed-Cost-Quality Flexibility. Technical Report HCIL-2010-09 (University of Maryland, College Park, 2010).

Quinn, A. J., Bederson, B. B.  A Taxonomy of Distributed Human Computation. Technical Report HCIL-2009-23 (University of Maryland, College Park, 2009).

Museum Applications for Tabletop Computers

As a side project, I am working on the design and development of an application for displaying old Asian scrolls and Persian manuscripts on the Microsoft Surface. This is a collaboration between MITH (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities) and the Smithsonian Institution Freer and Sackler Galleries.

StoryKit: Designing with Children and Their Elders

Readability in the International Children's Digital Library

The International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) is a collection of exemplary children's books from around the world, made freely available for reading on the web. Together with Ben Bederson, Chang Hu, and Takeshi Arisaka, we developed methods for making the books easier to read on small screens, easier to translate into alternate languages, and easier to access for blind users.

Quinn, A. J., Hu, C., Arisaka, T., Rose, A., and Bederson, B. B. 2008. Readability of scanned books in digital libraries. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008). CHI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 705-714. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1357054.1357166

Bederson, B. B., Quinn, A. J., and Druin, A. 2009. Designing the Reading Experience for Scanned Multi-lingual Picture Books on Mobile Phones. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Austin, Texas, USA, June 15 - 19, 2009). JCDL '09. ACM, New York, NY.

Visualization of Temporal Data with Sentinal Events

My class project in information visualization explored the idea of aligning temporal data by sentinal events. The work has been further developed by Taowei Wang with Catherine Plaisant and Ben Shneiderman.

Wang, T. D., Plaisant, C., Quinn, A. J., Stanchak, R., Murphy, S., and Shneiderman, B. 2008. Aligning temporal data by sentinel events: discovering patterns in electronic health records. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008). CHI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 457-466. DOI=http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1357054.1357129

Interrogative Programming

What if, instead of learning a programming language, the computer could ask you a bunch of questions about what kind of program you want to make? Think of it like a consultant. I implemented this using a context-free grammar to guide a line of questioning. My user studies validated the idea on very simple tasks, but revealed some tough challenges for using this to build more useful programs. This was an undergraduate senior project advised by Steve Tanimoto at the University of Washington.

Quinn, A.. 2002. An Interrogative Approach to Novice Programming. In Proceedings of the IEEE 2002 Symposia on Human Centric Computing Languages and Environments (Hcc'02) (September 03 - 06, 2002). HCC. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 83.

CookieWatcher: Privacy Awareness in the Browser

Do users have any concept of the cookies being set in their web browsers? This Firefox extension lets you see cookies that are coming into your computer in real time so you can be more aware of how they are affecting your privacy. With this awareness, you can make more informed decisions about how to set your cookie preferences in your browser and which sites you might want to avoid algotether. This research project was part of a larger effort exploring informed consent online in collaboration with Batya Friedman and Dan Howe. Unfortunately, the extension is currently out of sync with the latest versions of Firefox, but it still has homes and screenshots at Mozdev and Mozilla.org.