Volume 60, Issue 1 - Human Computation / Guest Editors: François Bry, Clemens Schefels and Christoph Wieser

Citizen science is a growing approach in science and the opportunities of new technologies and learning are considered more and more. We give an overview of the current practice of mobile learning in Germany by conducting an explorative survey among environmental citizen science projects using mobile apps. This study supports the idea that education is relevant in citizen science, and apps affect the learning experience of participants. However, several obstacles were identified that need to be considered, to be able to fully exploit the benefits of mobile learning in citizen science.

In this paper we introduce the design and technical implementation of the citizen science project Migraine Radar. The goal of the project is to establish a large collection of migraine attack data in order to explore the trigger factors of migraine attacks. A main focus is the investigation of the influence of environmental factors like weather or changes in the geomagnetic activity on the frequency of migraine attacks. After registering with the project, participants report their migraine attack data using a web app or one of the smartphone apps implemented for Android and iOS. As a benefit, the system serves as a personal headache calendar and participants have access to statistics and individualized reports about their attacks. For scientific analysis the data are pre-processed and provided to the researchers in an anonymized way.

This paper offers a short report on a participatory citizen science project and offers some reflections on the lessons learned. In particular, we report on our aims and methods, and the development and use of a web application that we designed to enable a collective analysis of press releases allowing a high number of users. Specifically, we give a brief account of the HTML- and PHP-based platform, which was used to analyze and review press releases on a controversial vaccine.

In this article we report about our efforts to develop and evaluate computational support tools for literary studies. We present a novel method and tool that allows interactive visual analytics of character occurrences in Victorian novels, and has been handed to humanities scholars and students for work with a number of novels from different authors. Our user study reveals insights about Victorian novels that are valuable for scholars in the digital humanities field, and informs UI as well as UX designers about how these domain experts interact with tools that leverage network science.

Crowdsourcing has revolutionised the way tasks can be completed but the process is frequently inefficient, costing practitioners time and money. This research investigates whether crowdsourcing can be optimised with a validation process, as measured by four criteria: quality; cost; noise; and speed. A validation model is described, simulated and tested on real data from an online crowdsourcing game to collect data about human language. Results show that by adding an agreement validation (or a like/upvote) step fewer annotations are required, noise and collection time are reduced and quality may be improved.

In domains such as e-commerce, logistics, or healthcare, the conduct of service processes is widely supported by information systems and event data is generated continuously during process execution. Such event data constitutes a valuable source of information to monitor and improve the respective service processes. My research focuses on models and methods to support event-driven analysis of service processes. Specifically, I study how event logs produced by information systems are used to automatically construct models for qualitative and quantitative analysis. Aiming at online assessment and predictive analysis of a process' behaviour, I develop monitoring techniques that utilise streams of event data produced by diverse sources. Architectures that enable efficient handling of event streams are another focal point of my research. In this article, I outline some of the related research questions and highlight my recent results in these areas.