#hcil AskSheet: Frugal Crowd-sourcing for Decision Support (Alex Quinn)

example: how to choose a new smartphone; a bunch of published physical characteristics + a bunch of personal criteria that are harder to discover;Â using a few attributes, filter to a smaller group of choices, then dig into each on the other attributes to decide
other similar problems: find a specialist physician, location for company HQ, grad school to apply to, vacation itinerary, meeting time
Amazon Mechanical Turk: pay people small amounts to gather information; good for collecting specs
example: which store has the cheapest total price for a shopping list? use mechanical turk to get people to look up a price in each store’s special flier for a small set of items (meaningful chunks); one store at a time; order the tasks so that the highest price, highest variation prices are first because they impact total most
AskSheet: list all items, approximated spec ranges, and goal cell; custom ASK() function to tell system how to create the task forms for Mechanical Turk; prioritizes things so not all possible tasks need to be performed; can expect ~30% task savings with the optimization
not all problems appropriate for the optimization