Work in Progress on a Mobile Crowdsourcing System accepted at CHI

Congratulations to our Delta Lab students, Emily Harburg and Youngsong Kim for their Work In Progress acceptance at CHI titled “CrowdFound: A Mobile Crowdsourcing System to Find Lost Items On-the-Go” 

CrowdFound allows users to input lost item descriptions on a map and then sends notifications to users passing near tagged areas. To assess the system’s efficacy, they conducted interviews and user testing on CrowdFound. Their results show that users were able to find lost items when using a combination of the notification, map, and item description features. In addition, users were willing to deviate off path to look for lost items, particularly when exercising. Their findings also suggest socio-technical features to promote more effective on-the-go crowdsourced help on microtasks. This research builds CHI’s understanding of physical crowdsourcing as a tool for solving societal problems and suggests broader implications for utilizing mobile crowds.