(2) Frenzy: Collaborative Data Organization for Creating Conference Sessions

[CHI '14]
Frenzy: Collaborative Data Organization for Creating Conference Sessions

Lydia Chilton, University of Washington Seattle, WA
Juho Kim, MIT CSAIL Cambridge, MA
Paul André, HCI Institute, CMU Pittsburgh, PA
Felicia Cordeiro, University of Washington Seattle, WA
James Landay, University of Washington Seattle, WA
Daniel S. Weld,  University of Washington Seattle, WA
Steven P. Dow, HCI Institute, CMU Pittsburgh, PA
Robert C. Miller, MIT CSAIL Cambridge, MA
Haoqi Zhang, MIT CSAIL Cambridge, MA
                     Northwestern University Evanston, IL

Organizing conference sessions around themes improves the experience for attendees. However, the session creation process can be difficult and time-consuming due to the amount of expertise and effort required to consider alternative paper groupings. We present a collaborative web application called Frenzy to draw on the efforts and knowledge of an entire program committee. Frenzy comprises (a) inter-faces to support large numbers of experts working collectively to create sessions, and (b) a two-stage process that decomposes the session-creation problem into meta-data elicitation and global constraint satisfaction. Meta-data elicitation involves a large group of experts working simultaneously, while global constraint satisfaction involves a smaller group that uses the meta-data to form sessions. We evaluated Frenzy with 48 people during a deployment at the CSCW 2014 program committee meeting. The session making process was much faster than the traditional process, taking 88 minutes instead of a full day. We found that meta-data elicitation was useful for session creation. Moreover, the sessions created by Frenzy were the basis of the CSCW 2014 schedule.