KAIST Fall 2023

CS473: Introduction to Social Computing

Human-computer interaction no longer only concerns a single user in front of their computer. An increasing number of modern systems are inherently social, involving a large group of users to collaborate, discuss, ideate, solve problems, and make decisions together via social interaction. This course focuses on crowdsourcing and social computing, two of the most important concepts in the era of interaction at scale. This course will cover major design issues and computational techniques in building crowdsourcing and social computing systems.

This is a highly interactive class: You’ll be expected to actively participate in activities, projects, assignments, and discussions. There will be no lectures or exams. Major course activities include:

Topic Presentation: Once a semester, you'll lead the class by summarizing the readings and peer students' critiques, and spurring the in-class discussion. You’ll also get a chance to design your own activity that best captures the topic of a class.
Design Project: In a semester-long team project, you'll design, build, and test your own crowdsourcing / social computing system. If you have an ongoing research project that might benefit from having a crowdsourcing / social computing component, connecting to your research is encouraged.
In-class Activities: Each class will feature activities that will help you experience and practice the core concepts introduced in the course.

Course Staff

Instructor: Prof. Juho Kim
Office Hours: by appointment

TAs:
Kihoon Son
Junho Myung
Office Hours: by appointment

Staff Mailing List: cs473@kixlab.org

Time & Location

When: 10:30-11:45pm Mon/Wed
Where: Zoom live sessions (As active participation in in-class activity, discussion, and presentation is expected, attending live sessions is required.)

Links

Course Website: social.kixlab.org
Submission & Grading: KLMS
Discussion and Q&A: Classum
Topic Presentations
Previous Years: 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016

Updates

11/27: Project 5: Project Showcase and Project 6: Final Report are out.
11/1: Project 4: High-fi Prototype is out. Due: 11/15.
10/23: Assignment 2: Be a Crowd Worker is out. Due: 11/1.
10/4: Project 3: Low-fi Prototype is out. Due: 10/11.
9/22: Project 2: Pitch is out. Due: in class on 9/27.
9/16: Project 1: Ideation is out. Due: 9/20.
9/11: Project 0: Team Formation is out. Due: 9/13.
8/30: Assignment 1: Social Computing HOFS is out. Due: 9/6.
8/28: Complete the course sign-up form. Due: 11:59pm on 9/4 (Mon)
8/27: First class instructions with the class Zoom link are emailed to all students who registered. Please contact course staff if you haven't received the email.
7/26: Welcome to the Intro to Social Computing class!

Schedule

Week	Date	Topic	Reading	Due
1	8/28	Introduction & Course Overview
1	8/30	Social Computing Overview	(1) Jonathan Grudin. "Why CSCW applications fail: problems in the design and evaluation of organizational interfaces." CSCW 1988. (2) Mark Ackerman. "The Intellectual Challenge of CSCW: The Gap Between Social Requirements and Technical Feasibility". Human-computer interaction 15.2 (2000): 179-203.
2	9/4	Communication Tools	(1) Jim Hollan & Scott Stornetta. "Beyond Being There." CHI 1992. (2) Gina Venolia, John C. Tang, & Kori Inkpen. "SeeSaw: I See You Saw My Video Message." MobileHCI 2015.
2	9/6	Collaboration Tools	(1) Aniket Kittur & Robert Kraut. "Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in wikipedia: quality through coordination." CSCW 2008. (2) Rajan Vaish et al. "Crowd Research: Open and Scalable University Laboratories." UIST 2017.	Assignment 1: Social Computing HOFS
3	9/11	Peer Production	(1) Michael Nielsen. "Open Science Now!" TEDxWaterloo video, 2011 (16 mins). + Tim Gowers, "Is massively collaborative mathematics possible?" 2009. (2) Yochai Benkler and Helen Nissenbaum. "Commons‐based peer production and virtue." Journal of political philosophy 14.4 (2006): 394-419. (read pages 394-409)
3	9/13	Discussion and Q&A	(1) Lena Mamykina et al. "Design Lessons from the Fastest Q&A Site in the West." CHI 2011. (2) Amy Zhang et al. "Wikum: Bridging Discussion Forums and Wikis Using Recursive Summarization." CSCW 2017.	Project 0: Team Formation
4	9/18	Collective Action & Civic Participation	(1) Wael Ghonim. "Inside the Egyption Revolution". TED video, 2011 (10 mins) + Wael Ghonim. "Let's Design Social Media that Drives Real Change". TEDGlobal>Geneva video, 2015 (13 mins). (2) Kate Starbird and Leysia Palen. "Voluntweeters: Self-organizing by digital volunteers in times of crisis." CHI 2011.
4	9/20	Prototyping Tutorial		Project 1: Ideation
5	9/25	Social Networks 1	(1) Motahhare Eslami et al. "I always assumed that I wasn't really that close to [her]: Reasoning about Invisible Algorithms in News Feeds." CHI 2015. (2) Eric Gilbert and Karrie Karahalios. "Predicting tie strength with social media." CHI 2009.
5	9/27	Project Pitches		Project 2: Pitch
6	10/2	No class (Chuseok Holiday)
6	10/4	Social Networks 2	(1) Farhad Manjoo. "How Twitter Is Being Gamed to Feed Misinformation." The New York Times, 2017.05.31. (2) Adam Marcus et al. "TwitInfo: Aggregating and Visualizing Microblogs for Event Exploration." CHI 2011.
7	10/9	No class (Hangul Proclamation Day)
7	10/11	Project Feedback Meetings		Project 3: Low-fi Prototype
8	10/16	No class (Midterms week)
8	10/18	No class (Midterms week)
9	10/23	Crowdsourcing & Human Computation	(1) Luis Von Ahn and Laura Dabbish. "Labeling images with a computer game." CHI 2004. (2) Anhai Doan et al. "Crowdsourcing systems on the World-Wide Web." Communications of the ACM, April 2011.
9	10/25	Crowdsourcing Platforms & Workflows	(1) Michael S. Bernstein et al. "Soylent: a word processor with a crowd inside." UIST 2010. (2) Jeffrey P. Bigham et al. "VizWiz: nearly real-time answers to visual questions." UIST 2010.
10	10/30	Web Programming Tutorial
10	11/1	Quality Control 1: Task-level Techniques, Input/Output Agreement	(1) Rion Snow et al. "Cheap and fast---but is it good?: evaluating non-expert annotations for natural language tasks." EMNLP 2008. (2) Panos Ipeirotis. "Worker Evaluation in Crowdsourcing: Gold Data or Multiple Workers?" 2010.	Assignment 2: Be a Crowd Worker
11	11/6	Quality Control 2: Reputation and Bias	(1) Harris, Mark. "How a lone hacker shredded the myth of crowdsourcing." Wired, 2015. (2) Harper. "Crowdsourcing isn't broken." Wired, 2015.
11	11/8	Incentives & Gamification	(1) Gerard Beenan et al. "Using social psychology to motivate contributions to online communities." CSCW 2004. (2) Chris Lintott. "How to discover a planet from your sofa." TEDxCERN Video, 2013 (12 mins). (3) Thorin Klosowski, "The Psychology of Gamification: Can Apps Keep You Motivated?" LifeHacker, February 2014.
12	11/13	In-class Project Work Time
12	11/15	Project Feedback Meetings		Project 4: High-fi Prototype
13	11/20	Antisocial Behavior & Moderation	(1) Justin Cheng et al. "Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions." CSCW 2017. (2) Shagun Jhaver et al. "Does Transparency in Moderation Really Matter?: User Behavior After Content Removal Explanations on Reddit." CSCW 2019.
13	11/22	Human-AI Interaction	(1) Marti Hearst, James Allen, Curry I. Guinn, and Eric Horvitz. Mixed-initiative interaction. IEEE Intelligent Systems and their Applications 14.5 (1999): 14-23. (2) Shyam Sankar. The Rise of Human Computer Cooperation. TED Talk Video, 2012 (12 mins).
14	11/27	Ethics & FAccT (Fairness, Accountability, & Transparency)	(1) Cathy O'Neil. "The era of blind faith in big data must end." TED Video, 2017 (13 mins). (2) Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison. "How Cambridge Analytica turned Facebook ‘likes’ into a lucrative political tool." The Guardian, Mar. 2018. (3) Nicholas Diakopoulos et al. "Principles for Accountable Algorithms and a Social Impact Statement for Algorithms."
14	11/29	No class (Undergraduate Admission Interviews Day)
15	12/4	Final Presentations (in person)
15	12/6	Final Presentations & Course Wrap-up (in person)		Project 5: Final Presentations
16	12/11	No class (Finals week)
16	12/13	No class (Finals week)		Project 6: Final Report

Topics

Major topics include:

Crowdsourcing and human computation
Social computing platforms
Social networks and online communities
Computer supported collaborative work
Privacy and ethics
Incentives and gamification
Online experimentation and analysis
Programming paradigms
Quality control and fighting malicious behaviors

Grading

Design project: 40%
Topic Presentation: 20%
Assignments: 30%
Class participation: 10%

Late policy: For assignments and project milestones, you'll lose 10% for each late day. Submissions will be accepted until three days after the deadline.

Prerequisites

There are no official course prerequisites. But assignments and the final project will require building features of a crowdsourcing / social computing system, so programming skills are needed. Knowledge or research experience in HCI (CS374 or equivalent) or social computing is useful, but not required.