Human-Centered Data Science Lab

“Let’s share food and flavors we care about, and learn new recipes,” so began the entreaty by lab member and CSE PhD student Katie Kuksenok to start a lab tradition of sharing healthier homemade foods. Out with the pizzas and sodas and in with the fresh soups, salads, breads, and grains. The SCCL’s inaugural lab meal was a huge success, featuring delicious dishes fresh from Katie’s kitchen, including a savory pumpkin curry soup with lentils, a sweet potato cranberry arugula salad, and a chai spices mango bread pudding. Lab member Michael Brooks contributed warm corn bread, the perfect addition to this fall meal. SCCL director Cecilia Aragon commented, “judging from everybody’s delighted commentary and lip-smacking, it was a tremendous success.” Looking around at the empty dishes and big smiles after the meeting, we couldn’t agree more.

On next week’s menu: Korean style rice balls with vegetables, meats, and fish, and a mapo tofu side contributed from the kitchen of lab member and PhD student Ray Hong. Yum!

SCC lab member Megan Torkildson has received the College of Engineering’s Emerging Leaders in Engineering Scholarship and HCDE’s Boeing Scholarship. The Emerging Leaders Scholarship is awarded to undergraduate students in the Emerging Leaders in Engineering program who demonstrate leadership potential.

Megan is currently an undergraduate in Human Centered Design & Engineering and was previously a National Science Foundation S-STEM Scholar. Her main academic interests are interaction design, information visualization, crowdsourcing, and social media research. She placed second in the CHI 2013 Student Research Competition for her work on visualizing machine learning errors. Megan also works as a PEERs (Promoting Equity in Engineering Relationships) leader, educating the engineering community about the importance of diversity in engineering.

SCC lab member John Robinson received the Sakson Diversity Undergraduate Scholarship in the Human Centered Design & Engineering Department. The scholarship was established to award undergraduate students in HCDE that are expanding diversity in the educational and professional setting.

SCC Lab member and CSE PhD student Katie Kuksenok and SCC Lab director Cecilia Aragon were co-authors on a recent article accepted to the Journal of Surgical Research. The article titled “Crowd-Sourced Assessment of Technical Skills (C-SATS): A Novel Method to Evaluate Surgical Performance” marks the first use of crowdsourcing for surgical skills assessment. The article was co-authored by Carolyn Chen, Lee White, Timothy Kowalewski, Rajesh Aggarwal, Chris Lintott, Bryan Comstock, Katie Kuksenok, Cecilia Aragon, Daniel Holst, and Thomas Lendvay.

The article explores the effectiveness of large crowds sampled from two on-line crowdsourcing venues, Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk and Facebook, testing the hypothesis that crowdsourcing of technical skills using validated surgical assessment tools is equivalent to assessment by experienced surgeon educators. Their results show that not only could crowds, presumably unfamiliar with surgical education, rate a common robotic surgery suturing task equivalent to experienced surgeons’ ratings, but that the crowds could also be honed to identify crowd workers who demonstrated markers of critical thinking making the workers more accurate. While this research finding does not presume that such a rating can assess surgical judgement, they note that this observation is not unlike being able to identify good from bad athletic performances in a sport one may have no ability to play.

This research represents a departure from conventional wisdom and practice in the area of procedural skills education. CSATS may provide a potential opportunity to disseminate basic technical skills assessment rapidly and globally while preserving educator resources ‘on the ground’ for refined, tailored advanced technical skills curricula to accelerate individual learning curves.