(4) Cobi: A Community-Informed Conference Scheduling Tool

[UIST '13]
Cobi: A Community-Informed Conference Scheduling Tool

Juho Kim                             Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Haoqi Zhang                     Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
Paul André                     Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Lydia B. Chilton             University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Wendy Mackay             INRIA, Orsay, France
Michel Beaudouin-Lafon   Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France
Robert C. Miller             Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Steven P. Dow                     Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Effectively planning a large multi-track conference requires an understanding of the preferences and constraints of organizers, authors, and attendees. Traditionally, the onus of scheduling the program falls on a few dedicated organizers. Resolving conflicts becomes difficult due to the size and complexity of the schedule and the lack of insight into community members' needs and desires. Cobi presents an alternative approach to conference scheduling that engages the entire community in the planning process. Cobi comprises (a) communitysourcing applications that collect preferences, constraints, and affinity data from community members, and (b) a visual scheduling interface that combines communitysourced data and constraint-solving to enable organizers to make informed improvements to the schedule. This paper describes Cobi's scheduling tool and reports on a live deployment for planning CHI 2013, where organizers considered input from 645 authors and resolved 168 scheduling conflicts. Results show the value of integrating community input with an intelligent user interface to solve cmplex planning tasks.