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.