Design@Large: Jaime Teevan: Microproductivity: Getting Big Things Done with Little Microtasks

Jaime Teevan
Principal Researcher
Microsoft Research

Microproductivity:
Getting Big Things Done with Little Microtasks
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
CSE 1202, UC San Diego

ABSTRACT
Many of the chunks of time we have in a day are too short to bother trying to use productively. Think of the time you spend waiting for a meeting to start, riding in an elevator, or standing in line. We try to defrag our time by booking meetings with ourselves, turning off our phones, and taking email vacations. But there is another way. Rather than fighting fragmentation by changing how we work, we can embrace it by changing our tasks to fit the way we actually do work. We call this microproductivity, in which large productivity tasks are broken down into a series of smaller microtasks. The component microtasks can then be completed by the task owner via selfsourcing, or by the crowd via crowdsourcing. The transformation of work into microwork will change when and how people work, and enable individuals and automated processes to efficiently and easily complete complex tasks.

BIOGRAPHY
Jaime Teevan is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and affiliate faculty at the University of Washington. Working at the intersection of human computer interaction and information retrieval, she studies people’s information seeking activities. Much of her research focuses on the social and temporal context of information use, and she developed the first personalized search algorithm used by Bing. Her accomplishments have been honored with Technology Review (TR35) Young Innovator and Borg Early Career awards. She has published over one hundred technical articles, books, award papers, and patents, and given numerous keynotes. Jaime received a Ph.D. from MIT and a B.S. from Yale University. http://research.microsoft.com/~teevan

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