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.