Lilly and Six got some press love from NewScientist in the article posted here:
“It is crowd-working’s original platform, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT), that is the first port of call for reform. Mechanical Turk’s entire business model hinges on persuading large numbers of workers to do tiny tasks for pennies at a time. And it relies on turning its group of human workers into “a system that doesn’t talk back”, says Lilly Irani, a computer scientist at the University of California in Irvine.”
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Tags: Lilly Irani, Mechanical Turk, press, Six Silberman, Turkopticon |
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| Posted: 2/10/13 12:40 am UTC by admin Make the First Comment | |
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A video preview of Lilly Irani and Six Silberman’s paper “Turkopticon: Interrupting Worker Invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk”.
Full preprint available via Lilly’s blog, Underthinking.
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Tags: Lilly Irani, Mechanical Turk, paper, Six Silberman, Turkopticon, video, youtube |
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| Posted: 1/14/13 9:52 pm UTC by admin Make the First Comment | |
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Photo courtesy of paulworthington
Congratulations to Informatics Ph.D. students and researchers, Lilly Irani and Six Silberman on having their paper, “Turkopticon: Interrupting Worker Invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk” accepted to CHI 2013.
“As HCI researchers have explored the possibilities of human computation, they have paid less attention to ethics and values of crowdwork. This paper offers an analysis of Amazon Mechanical Turk, a popular human computation system, as a site of technically mediated worker-employer relations. We argue that human computation currently relies on worker invisibility. We then present Turkopticon, an activist system that allows workers to publicize and evaluate their relationships with employers. As a common infrastructure, Turkopticon also enables workers to engage one another in mutual aid. We conclude by discussing the challenges of sustaining activist technologies in existing, large-scale socio-technical systems.”
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Tags: activism, CHI, ethics, human computation, labor, Lilly Irani, Mechanical Turk, paper, Six Silberman, Turkopticon |
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| Posted: 12/11/12 3:00 pm UTC by admin Make the First Comment | |
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Photo courtesy of paulworthington
Congratulations to Informatics faculty and researchers, Bill Tomlinson, Bonnie Nardi, Don Patterson and Six Silberman on having their paper, “Collapse Informatics and Practice: Theory, Method, and Design” accepted to a special issue of ToCHI focussed on ‘Sustainable HCI through Everyday Practices’
“What happens if efforts to achieve sustainability fail? Research in many fields argues that contemporary global industrial civilization will not persist indefinitely in its current form, and may, like many past human societies, eventually collapse. Arguments in environmental studies, anthropology, and other fields indicate that this transformation could begin within the next half-century. While imminent collapse is far from certain, it is prudent to consider now how to develop sociotechnical systems for use in these scenarios. We introduce the notion of collapse informatics—the study, design, and development of sociotechnical systems in the abundant present for use in a future of scarcity. We sketch the design space of collapse informatics and a variety of example projects. We ask how notions of practice—theorized as collective activity in the “here and now”—can shift to the future since collapse has yet to occur. ”
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Tags: anthropology, Bill Tomlinson, Bonnie Nardi, collapse, Donald J. Patterson, paper, paper published, Six Silberman, sustainability, ToCHI |
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| Posted: 11/16/12 6:33 pm UTC by admin Make the First Comment | |
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Lilly and Six get some press love from Alternet in this article:
“Consequently, she and programmer Six Silberman created the browser add-on Turkopticon which “turkers,” as AMT workers call themselves, can use to warn each other off low-paying customers and intermediaries. Companies using the crowdworking platform are called “requesters.” The Turkopticon is ironically modeled on English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, another 18th-century invention. Never fully realized, the building design was intended to enable one-way surveillance of prisoners and other social “deviants.””
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Tags: labor pools, Lilly Irani, Mechanical Turk, Six Silberman |
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| Posted: 10/2/12 3:00 pm UTC by admin Make the First Comment | |
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Props to LUCI/Informatics folks/friends who got to weigh in on this piece in the East Bay Express about Digital Sweatshops:
“There’s this sort of competitive insanity of the business environment,” said Six Silberman, a longtime observer of the field who helped create a forum, Turkopticon, for people doing this kind of work. “And everyone’s trying to cut costs as strenuously and as rapidly as possible.” In a globalized economy, that’s easy to do: Mechanical Turkers — even those who live in the US — make somewhere around $1.50 an hour on average, enjoy no worker protections, and have no benefits.
Even that might be an overstatement: Numbers are hard to track and vary from worker to worker, but Ipeirotis has estimated the average hourly wage to be roughly $2, while Joel Ross of UC Irvine’s Department of Informatics places it closer to $1.25 — and whatever it is, it’s certainly lower than the federal minimum wage of $7.25.
In 2008, Silberman, along with Turkopticon’s cofounder, Lilly Irani, created a HIT to ask workers what their ideal “turker’s bill of rights would look like.” The vast majority of the 67 answers included some kind of recourse for work that’s rejected. “It’s disheartening to have your work rejected for something as simple as claiming an ‘Apple’ and a ‘Giraffe’ are not identical,” wrote one Turker. “I don’t care about the penny I didn’t earn for [not] knowing the difference between an apple and a giraffe, but I’m angry that MT will take requester’s money but not manage, oversee, or mediate the problems and injustices on their site.”
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Tags: Joel Ross, Lilly Irani, Mechanical Turk, media, press, Six Silberman |
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| Posted: 8/2/12 5:48 pm UTC by djp3 Make the First Comment | |
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Photo courtesy of paulworthington
The LUCI lab has had several papers accepted to CHI 2011. The list of accepted works was just released and includes the following by students, researchers, and faculty:
Full Papers:
Situating the Concern for Information Privacy through an Empirical Study of Responses to Video Recording by David Nguyen (LUCI Ph.D.), Aurora Bedford and Alex Bretana (Informatics undergrads) and Gillian R. Hayes (LUCI faculty)
Unpacking Exam-Room Computing: Negotiating Computer-Use in Patient-Physician Interactions by Yunan Chen (LUCI faculty), Victor Ngo and Sidney Harrison (Informatics Masters students) and Victoria Duong (UCI undergrad).
Comparing Activity Theory with Distributed Cognition for Video Analysis: Beyond “Kicking the Tires.” by Eric Baumer (former LUCI post-doc) and Bill Tomlinson (LUCI faculty)
Infrastructures for low-cost laptop use in Mexican schools
Ruy Cervantes (Informatics Ph.D.), Mark Warschauer (Ed. Dept.), Bonnie Nardi (LUCI Faculty), and Nithya Sambasivan (Informatics Ph.D.)
Designing a Phone Broadcasting System for Urban Sex Workers in India
Nithya Sambasivan (Informatics Ph.D.) and Ed Cutrell (Microsoft)
Classroom-Based Assistive Technology: Collective Use of Interactive Visual Schedules by Students with Autism
Meg Cramer (LUCI Ph.D.), Sen Hirano (LUCI M.S.), Monica Tentori (UABC), Michael Yeganyan (LUCI M.S.), and Gillian R. Hayes (LUCI Faculty)
Homebrew Databases: Complexities of Everyday Information Management in Nonprofit Organizations
Amy Voida (Informatics PostDoc), Ellie Harmon (LUCI Ph.D.), Ban Al-Ani (Informatics Faculty)
Why Do I Keep Interrupting Myself?: Environment, Habit and Self-Interruption
Laura Dabbish (CMU), Gloria Mark (Informatics Faculty), Victor Gonzalez, (ITAM)
Refraining from Technological Intervention by by Eric Baumer (former LUCI post-doc) and Six Silberman (former LUCI Ph.D. Student)
Congratulations
Alex, Aurora, Bill, David, Eric, Gillian, Sidney, Six, Victor, Yunan, Ruy, Bonnie, Nithya, Meg, Sen, Monica, Michael, Amy, Ellie, Ban, and Gloria!
From: Mechanical Turk Best Practices – O’Reilly Radar
“For most users of mechanical turk (us included), it has become an API call that fits smoothly within their workflow. (Or as someone at the meetup wryly suggested, turk is a Remote Person Call.) The last pair of speakers, Lilly Irani and Six Silberman, reminded us that behind mechanical turk lies thousands of workers† (“the crowd in the cloud”) working without (health care) benefits, oftentimes at extremely low hourly wages. Irani and Silberman suggested that rather than abstracting mechanical turk services as mere API calls, users should start thinking of the plight of the turks (“Mechanical Turk Bill of Rights”) behind the service. As a first step they have a released a Firefox plugin that aims to narrow the information assymetry between turks (those performing tasks) and requesters (those posting tasks). While requesters can see ratings for turks, requesters aren’t rated: Turkopticon lets turks rate requesters. They need more turks to download and start using Turkopticon, so if you know any mechanical turks please enourage them do so.”
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Tags: article, Lilly Irani, Mechanical Turk, Six Silberman |
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| Posted: 6/29/09 10:24 am UTC by djp3 Make the First Comment | |
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The Technology Garden is a novel interactive environment: a sensor-equipped community garden in a university office building created to invite interaction with both plants and people. Our goals were to promote human-plant interaction; to encourage social interaction in an organization; and to create a pleasing office environment promoting relaxation. Our research explores how technology can encourage relationship building, or the building of a community of interest in a work environment through non-work activity. Distinct from approaches that seek to minimize or remove the need for human intervention by automating plant care, we wish to draw attention to the needs of plants and to encourage human participation.
Charlotte Lee, Eric Kabisch, Silvia Lindtner,
Jahmeilah Richardson, M. Six Silberman
(cplee -at- ics.uci.edu, {ekabisch, lindtner,
jarichar, msilberm} -at -uci.edu)
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Tags: Bonnie Nardi, Charlotte Lee, Eric Kabisch, ethnography, Jahmellah Richardson, Silvia Lindtner, Six Silberman, sustainability |
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| Posted: 4/13/08 10:51 am UTC by djp3 Make the First Comment | |
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