Cobi

Communitysourcing Large-Scale Conference Scheduling

Cobi engages an entire academic community in planning a large-scale conference. Cobi elicits community members' preferences and constraints, and provides a scheduling tool empowering organizers to take informed actions toward improving the schedule.

Committeesourcing

Program committee members group papers sharing a common theme, providing affinity information between papers. This step provides mechanisms for clustering qualitative data given a small amount of experts' time. The collected data informs the initial session making process.

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Authorsourcing

Authors mark which other papers they find relevant to their paper, and which other papers they would personally like to attend. Cobi then encodes the responses into preferences and constraints, which reveals latent preferences and constraints previously not codified. This step provides fine-grained feedback to refine affinities and sessions.

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Cobi Scheduling Tool

Conference chairs use the web-based, visual scheduling interface that combines community input and constraint-solving intelligence. The tool enables chairs to resolve conflicts while considering other subjective factors, and to make informed improvements to the schedule.

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Confer

Conference attendees use the web app to decide where to spend their time during the conference by bookmarking favorite papers, getting social recommendations, and discovering the schedule. The recommendation engine takes authorsourcing data as initial input to bootstrap the algorithm, and improves as more attendees specify which papers they like.

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People in alphabetical order

Paul André (Facebook) Anant Bhardwaj (MIT CSAIL) Lydia Chilton (UW CSE) Steven P. Dow (CMU HCII) Juho Kim (MIT CSAIL) Robert C. Miller (MIT CSAIL) Haoqi Zhang (MIT CSAIL / Northwestern)

Publications

Anant Bhardwaj, Juho Kim, Steven P. Dow, David Karger, Sam Madden, Robert C. Miller, Haoqi Zhang. Attendee-sourcing: Exploring the Design Space of Community-Informed Conference Scheduling. HCOMP 2014.
Lydia Chilton, Juho Kim, Paul André, Felicia Cordeiro, James Landay, Dan Weld, Steven P. Dow, Robert C. Miller, Haoqi Zhang. Frenzy: Collaborative Data Organization for Creating Conference Sessions. CHI 2014. Honorable Mention Award.
Juho Kim, Haoqi Zhang, Paul André, Lydia B. Chilton, Anant Bhardwaj, David Karger, Steven P. Dow, and Robert C. Miller. Cobi: Community-Informed Conference Scheduling. HCOMP 2013 Demo.
Paul André, Haoqi Zhang, Juho Kim, Lydia B. Chilton, Steven P. Dow, and Robert C. Miller. Community clustering: Leveraging an academic crowd to form coherent conference sessions. HCOMP 2013. Notable Paper Award.
Juho Kim, Haoqi Zhang, Paul André, Lydia B. Chilton, Wendy Mackay, Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, Robert C. Miller, and Steven P. Dow. Cobi: A Community-Informed Conference Scheduling Tool. UIST 2013.
Haoqi Zhang, Paul André, Lydia Chilton, Juho Kim, Steven P. Dow, Robert C. Miller, Wendy MacKay, and Michel Beaudouin-Lafon. Cobi: Communitysourcing Large-Scale Conference Scheduling. CHI 2013 Extended Abstracts (Interactivity), Paris, France, 2013.

Contact

Please email cobi@lists.csail.mit.edu if you have any comments or questions.