Alex Quinn

Crowdsourcing and Human Computation

My dissertation research (ongoing) is about using human computation and crowdsourcing to tackle messy decision problems. Along the way, I have experimented with other ways of combining human intelligence with computer algorithms to solve problems in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision.

Quinn, A. J., Bederson, B. B.  Human Computation: A Survey and Taxonomy of a Growing Field.  CHI 2011.

Bederson, B. B., Quinn, A. J.  Web Workers Unite! Addressing Challenges of Online Laborers.  CHI 2011 EA (alt.chi).

Quinn, A. J., Bederson, B. B.  Human-Machine Hybrid Computation. CHI 2011 Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Human Computation.

Resnik, P., Buzek, O., Kronrod, Y., Hu, C., Quinn, A. J., Bederson, B. B. Using Targeted Paraphrasing and Monolingual Crowdsourcing to Improve Translation. To appear in ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST). In Press

Bederson, B. B., Quinn, A. J.  Appsheet: Efficient use of web workers to support decision making.  Technical Report HCIL-2011-26, University of Maryland, 2011.

Resnik, P., Buzek, O., Hu, C., Kronrod, Y., Quinn, A., & Bederson, B.B.  Improving Translation via Targeted Paraphrasing. EMNLP 2010.

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, 2010.

Restaurant Food Safety Inspections

As a side project, I am working in a group of economists and computer scientists to build a system to extract restaurant inspection reports from the web sites of health departments around the US. The goal is to study the data and ultimately make it available via a public API.

[project page]

Table Interfaces for Museums

Working with MITH and the Smithsonian Institution, I developed two applications for the Microsoft Surface for viewing precious Asian artwork that would otherwise be difficult to see in entirity in the museum. The applications were deployed at the Sackler Gallery beginning in May 2011.

Videos: A Breath Of Spring, Chinese calligraphy scroll, 14th century
Videos: Haft Awrang, Persian manuscript, 15th century

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 Professor Ben Bederson, Chang Hu, Takeshi Arisaka, and Anne Rose, 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., & Bederson, B. B. 2008. Readability of scanned books in digital libraries. CHI 2008.

Bederson, B. B., Quinn, A. J., & Druin, A. 2009. Designing the Reading Experience for Scanned Multi-lingual Picture Books on Mobile Phones. JCDL 2009.

Demos: “ClearText” method, “PopoutText” method

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 Dr. Taowei Wang with Dr. Catherine Plaisant and Professor Ben Shneiderman.

Wang, T. D., Plaisant, C., Quinn, A. J., Stanchak, R., Murphy, S., Shneiderman, B. Aligning temporal data by sentinel events: discovering patterns in electronic health records. CHI 2008.

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 Professor Steve Tanimoto at the University of Washington.

Quinn, A.  An Interrogative Approach to Novice Programming. HCC 2002.

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 Professor Batya Friedman and Dr. 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.