Crowdrescuing: Evidence from Hurricane Harvey

I am very impressed by people who help the affected people from hurricane Harvey in Texas. There are various groups in which the affected people ask for help and the closest people to them go and rescue them. It is amazing crowdrescuing case. My next publication definitely will be about this with the following topic:

How crowdrescuing increased the speed of rescuing: The Evidnece from Hurricane Harvey

Anyone wants to collaborate? I need a co-author :)

First Day of Teaching as an Instructor

I cannot believe I am putting all big challenges of my life behind my self one by one! I am getting braver and braver. I came for my PhD to a foreign country, I passed courses that was so challenging, I passed my Comps, and finally today I finished the first day of teaching! It was the most challenging work that I could do in my whole life. People who know me and know my personality understand what I mean! It means a lot for me.
I hope I have a good and successful semester ahead.

Thanks God :)

Comprehensive Exam

I passed comprehensive exam today... I am so happy and thankful to God... ready to enter the second half of my PhD life and start my dissertation. I hope I publish as many papers as I can to get a good academic job. I can do that :)

IDEA!

I just came up with a perfect idea for a research! It may not be a good idea for dissertation, but it has potential for publication as a simple research work. so excited!

Start of a new challenge in my life

I have decided to start a new challenge in my life! The challenge name is "love myself". In this challenge I want to be nice to people (as always have tried to be) and to be even nicer to myself (this part is a new one). In this chalenge I will do the followings:

1. After telling something to someone I will not think if I said the right thing or not! I will not be obsessed with what I have said before.
2. To defend myself whenever necessary. I will try to make everything Fair for myself and for the others. I will not sacrifice myself to look good and be considered a "good" girl.
3. I will not care about what people think and say about me. I am a grown woman and I already know what is right and what is wrong. I just need to trust myself and think positively about myself. And when it is necessary, I will ask the right people to help me to improve myself. 

To follow the above mentioned lifestyle, I need to know:

• "Satisfying everyone is impossible"
• "We will live just once"

Today, I successfully passed this challenge! Congrats to my self and I will continue it.

2016- New Year

Just a couple of minutes is remained until 2016. I cannot believe it is almost 2016. To be honest, I do not want it comes. I do not want tonight ends.... But, anyway, it will end.
2015 was an ordinary year for me. I did not have any failure and I did not have any success in my research life. I feel bad about it since failure/success shows how hard I tried to achieve a goal.
I have the following challenges for 2016:
1. Read at least 2 research papers each day
2. Exercise twice a week
3. Learn 5 new English vocabulary each day
4. Watch at least one Ted video each day
5. Read a book each 3 months (optional)

Happy new year :)

The importance of people around us

One of the most insightful lessons that I learned during my life is: Be cautious about the people whom you allow to enter your life (as roommate, as friend, or etc.). Some people can make you the happiest and the most successful person in this world and on the other hand, some people can convert your life to hell. It does not matter how hardworking, happy, successful you are, they can ruin your life.

I ruined my first year of PhD program by allowing a girl to enter my life (as ....)! Although I suffered a lot, Although I got very bad grades, Although she made last year the worst year in my entire life.... But, I gained an experience and this year I am so happy since I have very good roommate and very good friends around :)

Thanks God

Map of MTurk workers around the world

Amazon crreated an anonymized map of MTurk workers around the world:

http://techlist.com/mturk/global-mturk-worker-map.php

What am I grateful for in 2014?

Today is a good time to think about the past year and list what we are grateful for. I am grateful for every moments that I had during 2014. I had a lot of bad and good days during 2014 and I am grateful for all of those days. I am grateful for bad days since those days taught me that life is not easy and I need to be stronger to deal with the future challenges. I had some achievements in 2014 that I consider them as the best days in my academic life. I am grateful for those achievements since they were huge steps toward my goals. The publication of my research paper in one of the good journals was the first achievement of me in 2014 which leaded to my acceptance in Louisiana State University and my travel to USA and having the chance to work under supervision of one of the best researchers in IS field. That paper changed my life and all my hardworking paid off. I consider 2014 as a milestone in my academic life.
I have some short-term goals for 2015 and next year I will publish a post in this blog and list my achievements. I hope we all achieve our goals in 2015.

Happy new year :)

The first semester of PhD program finished (I survived)

The first semester of PhD program was very challenging for me. First semesters in B.Sc and M.Sc were though too, but first semester of PhD program was the most challenging semester that I have ever experienced . I cut my leisure time activities, I did not have hang-outs with friends and I spent whole my time on studying for the courses. I am not satisfied with my grades, but I got a lot of experiences during this semester. The first experience is that if you want to be successful in business school and get good grades, you just need to speak and participate in class discussions. I lost a lot of points because of not speaking at classes. I am a shy person and I really could not participate in discussions. The second experience is that studying 16-18 hours during a day has opposite results. For the next semester I am planning to have leisure time activities and I will play sports and will attend in some events. The third experience is that for improving we need to be sociable person and discuss about our problems with classmates. It helped me a lot in the last month of the first semester and I improved a lot. I thank my friends and family who gave me hope during the days that I did not have any hope or perspective. Although they were far from me, but they helped me to be optimistic about future and do my best. Finally, I Thank God for giving me the strength to get through those times.

Starting my PhD Program in Louisiana State University

In the past 11 months I've been through a lot of things. The past year was the most rewarding year of my life.

I achieved the most important dreams of my childhood and Adolescence. I overcame many obstacles to be where I am now. I have started a new journey and I hope I go through it as I have planned.

On Monday, August 11, 2014, I said goodbye to the most beloved people of my life, my Family. After about 30 hours of being in plane and layover in airports, I arrived my destination, the place that I come to build my future. A person from the university came to pick me up from Baton Rouge airport as it had been scheduled. That was the time that I said: " Yeah Hanieh, here is where you belong to."

We had a lot of Orientation, Campus tour, Baton Rouge tour, Welcome Parties, and etc. in the past 12 days. I want to confess that I have never had these joyful moments in my life.

On Tuesday, 26 August my first class will start and I want to promise myself that I will make the most of the chance that God has endowed me.

Thanks God :)

Master of Science Thesis Defense

I defended my M.Sc thesis. It was a great experience to defend a thesis subject that I've chosen on my own. Since the first semester of M.Sc program I have stick to Crowdsourcing subject and finally I ended up my thesis with it.

the title of my thesis was: "Identifying effective factors on crowdworkers' performance in crowdsourcing platforms".

I have to thank my professor (Dr. Abdollah Aghaie) who supports me and gives me hope and self confidence to work on new research areas.

To Become a Real Researcher

One of my dreams was to  be a researcher, to publish many papers, and finally become scientist. When my teachers asked me : "what do you want to become in future?" my answer was: "scientist". although I didn't know it's actual meaning, but I liked it a lot.

I put my first step toward being scientist when I started my MSc program. During the last year I get acquainted with how to research, but I can not pretend that I'm a real researcher. I have a long way to learn how to publish a good paper, and become a real researcher and scientist.

Which domain of crowdsourcing?

According to papers I have read about crowdsourcing, I figured out that crowdsourcing is an Interdisciplinary research area.  there are papers from  both computer science and business perspective.

Daren C. Brabham  wrote the following paragraph in his blog post :

" So how do you know which discipline is the best discipline to get a degree in where you can focus on crowdsourcing? Well, that depends on exactly what kinds of questions you have about crowdsourcing. If you’re interested in how to actually design and engineer crowdsourcing platforms and systems, how to optimize their performance, and so on, then you’re probably better off in a computer science program, or perhaps an information science or computer engineering program. If you’re interested in the performance of crowdsourcing applications (i.e., how to know when they’ve succeeded or if they’ve improved a business function), then an academic graduate program in business or management (academic: MS. As opposed to professional: MBA) would be the best fit. If you’re interested in how and why crowds form, how they are motivated, and their perceptions of crowdsourcing applications, you could look into a journalism & mass communication program, a psychology program, a sociology program, information science, and so on."

fortunately crowdsourcing can tie into many domains (such as computer science, business, etc.), but for my thesis topic I should specify a well defined specific topic in one of these domains ... I have just 1 month to decide.

Applying the NIST Definition of Cloud computing to Crowdsourcing

Panos Ipeirotis, in one of his posts took the NIST definition of cloud computing, and translated into a similar definition for crowdsourcing. I recommend to read his post here.

After reading his post, I wondered how these two areas are similar; but as Ipeirotis stated there is significant difference between Humans and Computers !

Crowdsourcing; Is That What I've Always Done to Get My Problems Solved

It was about 5 months ago that I saw the term "Crowdsourcing" Here  for the first time .

in the first view I thought it's what I'm looking for the research. when I searched about it and read some papers I get more and more interested.

Why?

previously when I encountered a problem that was ambiguous or unsolvable for me, and I didn't get the answer by searching in search engines, I would emailed the problem to some of my friends that I believed they have better knowledge than me in that case; and I often got answer from 1/2 of them.

or I would posted my problems in a forum and I got answers from more than 1/2 people.

the first technique could be defined as friend-sourcing and the second as forum-sourcing or community-sourcing  .... and if you compare these 2 terms with crowdsourcing you could conclude that crowdsourcing is a general term for both of them.

yeah ! I had used crowdsourcing for my problems even before I knew the term.

So; you could imagine why I'm interested in Crowdsourcing ...  Crowdsourcing is an approach that I use to solve most of my problems, it motivates me to help other people as well ...

I my self when get an answer from a forum for a problem; then prefer to be permanent user of that forum and answer the questions of other members as well...

in summary :

one incentive that could motivate people to participate in crowdsourcing tasks is that to give them something  they really need; it could be an answer to a very simple question that s/he discussed in the forum ...

online-forums may have more potential that Mechanical Turk Marketplaces if we could manage it well .

How the path of our lives could change

It happened to me a lot; while I was searching something in Google I directed to another irrelevant site that absorbed me and I got everyday visitor of that site! Completely accidentally!

Real life makes no difference; some events happen accidentally and change the way of our lives completely. Sometimes the thing you most want doesn't happen. And sometimes the thing you never expect to happen does.

You see/meet thousands of people every day, and none of them really talk to you. And then you meet /see one person, and your life is changed forever.

Yeah, life is so complex … we could plan for tomorrow but we could not assure what really will happen.

Semester 2

previous semester we were supposed to choose a research topic for one of our courses, we were free to choose topic from a wide range of subjects in computer science. I wanted to choose a topic which I could continue for my seminar and thesis as well. so I spent 3 months day-and-night just searching in Universities' sites for hot and challenging research topic that is interesting too.  our professors specified just 1 month deadline for selecting topic but it took me 3 months ! it was terrible ! I saw nightmare every night .

although I suffered a lot, fortunately I succeed , I found a topic that was new and interesting as well.

all those stressful days, paid off. now if a professor asks me to choose a topic; I relate "Crowdsourcing" to that course. for example this semester I have "strategic planning" and "CRM" courses and  I relate both of them to "crowdsourcing" as a research topic ! how lucky I am ! "crowdsourcing" is a topic that I can relate to all subjects :D ...

I wish you the bests

Choosing my Seminar topic

The recent week I spent most of my time searching internet for a good seminar topic about crowdsourcing, I believe the hardest part of each research is topic selection, you should know what you're going to achieve, what the result of this research will be, if it will have contribution or not, will you be able to publish paper, and etc.  You could be able to see the whole path of research procedure.

So I believe choosing thesis or seminar topic is a Big thesis itself!

Finally I didn't get any result from my searches. Although I get some help from a phd student in Berkeley university, and other people who have done research in this area, but after all I could not choose a specific seminar topic. Today was the deadline of specifying seminar topic. I went to see my advisor, asked him for some help; He asked me if BI, CRM, or Social Networks have any relationship with Crowdsourcing!! I replied I think social networks can help to optimize our crowdsourcing work! It was completely unconscious answer! I have not seen any paper about this case! But run the risk of being the first student (at least in my university) who will work on crowdsourcing and social networks! This was the first time in my whole life that I took a risk.

Yeah, this was the story of choosing my seminar topic, which was one of the most important decisions of my life.

I hope I get good results, and publish more and more papers, continue it for my MSc thesis and PhD thesis, etc.

Best Wishes for You.

Looking back

Looking back in my life, I see some people who had an important role to change me in a better way, people who taught me success does not mean to be well-educated, to have more and more published papers, to be rich , or to achieve what you aspire.

these people taught me the way to have happy life, to forgive easily, to  help generously, and to love truly . these people taught me when I feel a tinge of jealousy in myself try not to be pessimist, but try to do my best to achieve my goals and be optimist to all people .

I feel that I have never been in this level of happiness.

let's try to be good-hearted humans.

Best Wishes