Cobi: A community-informed conference scheduling tool
Author(s)
Zhang, Haoqi; Chilton, Lydia B.; Mackay, Wendy; Beaudouin-Lafon, Michel; Miller, Robert C.; Dow, Steven P.; Kim, Ju Ho; Andre, Paul; ... Show more Show less
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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 complex planning tasks.
Date issued
2013-10Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceJournal
Proceedings of the 26th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST '13)
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
Juho Kim, Haoqi Zhang, Paul Andre, Lydia B. Chilton, Wendy Mackay, Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, Robert C. Miller, and Steven P. Dow. 2013. Cobi: a community-informed conference scheduling tool. In Proceedings of the 26th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 173-182.
Version: Author's final manuscript
ISBN
9781450322683