Human-Centered Data Science Lab

HDS Lab Director Cecilia Aragon and Lab Member Daniel Perry co-authored a paper along with Marco Pritoni, Alan K. Meier, and Therese Peffer that was recently published in the journal, Energy Research & Social Science and covered in The Washington Post.

The study, “Energy efficiency and the misuse of programmable thermostats: The effectiveness of crowdsourcing for understanding household behavior,” recruited participants from the crowdsourcing service Mechanical Turk. These participants self-reported thermostat usage and took pictures of their programmable thermostats. The researchers found that misunderstanding and misuse of programmable thermostats was widespread, undermining their potential to contribute to energy efficiency and cost savings.

The research also revealed flaws in self-reported survey data, which raises questions about the validity of thermostat-related studies that rely solely on traditional surveys. And compared to traditional surveys, this crowdsourcing method allowed the study to be completed rapidly and at low cost.

Citation:

Pritoni, M;  Meier, A. K.;  Aragon, C.;  Perry, D.;  Peffer, T. (2015). Energy efficiency and the misuse of programmable thermostats: The effectiveness of crowdsourcing for understanding household behavior. Energy Research & Social Science, 8, 190-197.

HDS Lab member Katerena Kuksenok recently returned from travels that took her all over the world in the name of research. In mid-March, she attended the Computer Supported Cooperative Work Doctoral Colloquium in Canada to get feedback and critique on her dissertation proposal (extended abstract PDF). From there, she was off to Germany to join the Berlin United Nao Team Humbolt (NaoTH), which traveled together to Tehran to compete in the IranOpen humanoid robotic soccer competition. The team took a couple of weeks to travel around Iran, which they found to be a beautiful, friendly, and fascinating country. Then they returned to Germany for the GermanOpen in Magdeburg, another humanoid robotic soccer competition. There, the team slept in a hostel with quite a lot of goats and sheep, and a very pretty calf, and spent all waking hours eating and working in the conference center. So, Katerena has no idea about the rest of Magdeburg, which is probably not just a stretch of pleasant German countryside. In both Tehran and Madgeburg, the NaoTH team earned third place, though the GermanOpen match was so close (see 8:00 and on for the heat and the drama) that it necessitated an awkward, hilarious penalty shoot-out: the penalty shooter code had never been tested in a competition, and was written a year ago.

HDS Lab member Daniel Perry recently attended the Bio-IT Conference & Expo in Boston and delivered a talk called, “Human-Centered Game Design for Science Learning Games: A Bioinformatics Game Case Study.” His presentation provided a case study of the game MAX5, a bioinformatics learning game designed for youth. Daniel discussed a human centered design process as an applicable approach to the creative design of science games for diverse player types.

Lab Director and HCDE Professor Cecilia Aragon was recently invited to present seminars on data science at the two leading universities in Chile. She gave an invited talk on human-centered data science at the Millennium Project in Semantic Web Research (http://ciws.cl) at the University of Chile and then presented an interactive seminar on applications of human-centered data science to business and innovation in the Innovation Center at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. During her stay in Santiago, Aragon collaborated with researchers in the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Mathematical Modeling at the University of Chile and in the School of Design and Business School at the Universidad Católica.

Santiago, Chile