Cobi

Abstract

Effectively planning a large multi-track conference requires an understanding of the preferences and constraints of organizers, authors, and attendees. Traditionally, the onus of scheduling the program falls on a few dedicated organizers. Resolving conflicts becomes difficult due to the size and complexity of the schedule and the lack of insight into community members' needs and desires. Cobi presents an alternative approach to conference scheduling that engages the entire community in the planning process. Cobi comprises (a) communitysourcing applications that collect preferences, constraints, and affinity data from community members, and (b) a visual scheduling interface that combines communitysourced data and constraint-solving to enable organizers to make informed improvements to the schedule. This paper describes Cobi's scheduling tool and reports on a live deployment for planning CHI 2013, where organizers considered input from 645 authors and resolved 168 scheduling conflicts. Results show the value of integrating community input with an intelligent user interface to solve complex planning tasks.

Evaluating the Extension of Wall Displays with AR for Collaborative Work

“…This type of activity is common in various contexts, such as organizing physical papers on a desk [54], arranging icons on a desktop, or moving post-it notes around on a whiteboard during a brainstorming session [15]. In particular, wall displays have been used in several such tasks: for scheduling the CHI 2013 conference [37,50], navigating photos in a public city hall [62], and for various sensemaking tasks [5,35] such as identifying anomalies in a set of documents [24].…”

Putting the Pieces Back Together Again

“…A number of recent efforts in the CSCW community have focused on how to combine individual contributions to achieve larger goals. For instance, several projects have emphasized developing automated tools to help manage global constraints that are specific to situations such as travel itinerary planning [50], conference scheduling [8,22], and taxonomy development [9]. Unlike these systems, the work we describe here relies primarily on humans to manage global constraints.…”

“…By exploring many alternatives in parallel, while still reusing previous work as much as possible, the contest web approach may be especially useful for problems that are very important (where extensive effort is justified), very urgent (where parallel efforts may be critical), and/or very controversial (where working in a single group may be difficult). Finally, the contest web approach can be used even in situations where domain-specific automated tools (e.g., [8,9,22,50]) are not available.…”

Frenzy

“…Frenzy is part of a growing literature on communitysourcing [10] and conference planning [2,11,19]. Frenzy builds on a previous conference scheduling research tool called Cobi [11] which allows the conference organizers to schedule sessions at times that abide by constraints such as "no author can have his papers scheduled for presentation at the same time."…”

“…Frenzy builds on a previous conference scheduling research tool called Cobi [11] which allows the conference organizers to schedule sessions at times that abide by constraints such as "no author can have his papers scheduled for presentation at the same time." Cobi starts with a preliminary set of unscheduled papers based on paper sessions grouping.…”