skip to main content
research-article

TaskGenies: Automatically Providing Action Plans Helps People Complete Tasks

Published: 01 November 2013 Publication History

Abstract

People complete tasks more quickly when they have concrete plans. However, they often fail to create such action plans. (How) can systems provide these concrete steps automatically? This article demonstrates that these benefits can also be realized when these plans are created by others or reused from similar tasks. Four experiments test these approaches, finding that people indeed complete more tasks when they receive externally-created action plans. To automatically provide plans, we introduce the Genies workflow that combines benefits of crowd wisdom, collaborative refinement, and automation. We demonstrate and evaluate this approach through the TaskGenies system, and introduce an NLP similarity algorithm for reusing plans. We demonstrate that it is possible for people to create action plans for others, and we show that it can be cost effective.

References

[1]
Ackerman, M. A. and Malone, T. W. 1990. Answer garden: A tool for growing organizational memory. In Proceedings of SIGOIS. MIT, 31--39.
[2]
Ahmad, S., Battle, A., Malkani, Z., and Kamvar, S. D. 2011. The Jabberwocky programming environment for structured social computing. In Proceedings of UIST.
[3]
Allen, D. 2002. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Penguin, New York.
[4]
Amabile, T. and Kramer, S. 2011. The Progress Principle. Harvard Business Review Press, Boston, MA.
[5]
Bandura, A. and McClelland, D. C. 1977. Social Learning Theory. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
[6]
Bellotti, V., Ducheneaut, N., Howard, M., et al. 2003. Taking email to task: The design and evaluation of a task management centered email tool. In Proceedings of CHI. ACM, New York, 345--352.
[7]
Bellotti, V., Dalal, B., Good, N., et al. 2004. What a to-do: Studies of task management towards the design of a personal task list manager. In Proceedings of CHI. ACM Press, 735--742.
[8]
Bernstein, M., Tan, D., Smith, G., et al. 2009. Collabio: A game for annotating people within social networks. In Proceedings of UIST. ACM, New York, 97--100.
[9]
Bernstein, M., Little, G., Miller, R. C., et al. 2010. Soylent: A word processor with a crowd inside. In Proceedings of UIST. ACM, 313--322.
[10]
Brandt, J., Dontcheva, M., Weskamp, M., and Klemmer, S. R. 2010. Example-centric programming: Integrating web search into the development environment. In Proceedings of CHI. 513--522.
[11]
Dai, P., Mausam, and Weld, D. S. 2011. Artificial intelligence for artificial artificial intelligence. In Proceedings of AAAI.
[12]
de Marneffe, M.-C., MacCartney, B., and Manning, C. D. 2006. Generating typed dependency parses from phrase structure parses. In Proceedings of LREC. 449--454.
[13]
Dow, S., Kulkarni, A., Klemmer, S., and Hartmann, B. 2012. Shepherding the crowd yields better work. In Proceedings of CSCW.
[14]
Fellbaum, C. 1998. Wordnet: An Electronic Lexical Database. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
[15]
Gick, M. L. and Holyoak, K. J. 1980. Analogical problem solving. Cognit. Psych. 12, 3, 306--355.
[16]
Gollwitzer, P. M. 1996. The Psychology of Action: Linking Cognition and Motivation to Behavior. Guilford Press, New York.
[17]
Horowitz, D. and Kamvar, S. D. 2010. The anatomy of a large-scale social search engine. In Proceedings of WWW. ACM, 431--440.
[18]
Iqbal, S. T. and Bailey, B. P. 2006. Leveraging characteristics of task structure to predict the cost of interruption. In Proceedings of CHI. ACM Press, 741--750.
[19]
Iqbal, S. T. and Bailey, B. P. 2008. Effects of intelligent notification management on users and their tasks. In Proceedings of CHI. 91--100.
[20]
Karger, D., Oh, S., and Shah, D. 2011. Iterative learning for reliable crowdsourcing systems. In Proceedings of NIPS.
[21]
Karpicke, J. D. and Blunt, J. R. 2011. Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. Science 331.68018, 772--775.
[22]
Kittur, A., Chi, E., Pendleton, B. A., Suh, B., and Mytkowicz, T. 2007. Power of the few vs. wisdom of the crowd: Wikipedia and the rise of the bourgeoisie. In Proceedings of CHI.
[23]
Kittur, A., Smus, B., Kraut, R., and Khamkar, S. 2011. Crowdforge: Crowdsourcing complex work. In Proceedings of UIST. 43--52.
[24]
Kittur, A., Nickerson, J., Bernstein, M., Gerber, E., Shaw, A., Zimmerman, J., Lease, M., and Horton, J. 2013. The future of crowd work. In Proceedings of CSCW.
[25]
Kokkalis, N., Kohn, T., Pfeiffer, C., Chornyi, D., Bernstein, M., and Klemmer, S. 2013. EmailValet: Managing email overload through private, accountable crowdsourcing. In Proceedings of CSCW.
[26]
Kulkarni, A. P., Can, M., and Hartmann, B. 2011. Turkomatic: Automatic recursive task and workflow design for mechanical turk. In Proceedings of CHI EA. ACM Press, 2053--2058.
[27]
Kulkarni, C., Dow, S., and Klemmer, S. R. 2012. Early and repeated exposure to examples improves creative work. In Proceedings of Cognitive Science.
[28]
Law, E. and Zhang, H. 2011. Towards large-scale collaborative planning: Answering high-level search queries using human computation. In Proceedings of AAAI.
[29]
Law, E. and von Ahn, L. 2011. Human computation. Synth. Lect. Artifi. Intell. Mach. Learn. 5, 3, 1--121.
[30]
Lee, B., Srivastava, S., Kumar, R., Brafman, R., and Klemmer, S. R. 2010. Designing with interactive example galleries. In Proceedings of CHI. ACM Press, 2257--2266.
[31]
Leventhal, H., Singer, R., and Jones, S. 1965. Effects of fear and specificity of recommendation upon attitudes and behavior. J. Personal. Soc. Psych. 2, 1, 20--29.
[32]
Little, G., Chilton, L. B., Goldman, M., and Miller, R. C. 2010. Exploring iterative and parallel human computation processes. In Proceedings of KDD-HCOMP. ACM.
[33]
Luszczynska, A. 2006. An implementation intentions intervention, the use of a planning strategy, and physical activity after myocardial infarction. Soc. Sci. Med. 62, 4, 900--908.
[34]
Marsh, R. L., Landau, J. D., and Hicks, J. L. 1996. How examples may (and may not) constrain creativity. Mem. Cognit. 24, 5, 669--680.
[35]
Matejka, J., Grossman, T., and Fitzmaurice, G. 2011. IP-QAT: In-product questions, answers & tips. In Proceedings of UIST. ACM, 175--184.
[36]
Milkman, K., Beshears, J., Choi, J., Laibson, D., and Madrian, B. 2011. Using implementation intentions prompts to enhance influenza vaccination rates. Proc. National Acad. Sci. 108, 26, 10415--10420.
[37]
Miller, G. A. 1995. WordNet: A lexical database for English. Comm. ACM, 39--41.
[38]
Morris, M. R., Teevan, J., and Panovich, K. 2010. What do people ask their social networks, and why? A survey study of status message Q&A behavior. In Proceedings of CHI. ACM, 1739--1748.
[39]
O’Donoghue, T. and Rabin, M. 2001. Choice and procrastination. Quart. J. Econom. 116, 1, 121--160.
[40]
Robinson, R. 2001. Calibrated peer reviewTM. The American Biology Teacher 63.7, 474--480.
[41]
Salvucci, D. D. and Bogunovich, P. 2010. Multitasking and monotasking: The effects of mental workload on deferred task interruptions. In Proceedings of CHI. 85--88.
[42]
Smith, S. M., Ward, T. B., and Schumacher, J. S. 1993. Constraining effects of examples in a creative generation task. Mem. Cognit. 21, 6, 837--845.
[43]
Strauss, A. 1985. Work and the division of labor. Sociological Quart. 26, 1, 1--19.
[44]
Surowiecki, J. 2004. The wisdom of crowds: Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations. Doubleday, New York.
[45]
von Ahn, L. and Dabbish, L. 2004. Labeling images with a computer game. In Proceedings of CHI. ACM Press, 319--326.
[46]
von Ahn, L., Blum, M., and Langford, J. 2004. Telling humans and computers apart automatically. Comm. ACM.
[47]
von Ahn, L., Maurer, B., McMillen, C., Abraham, D., and Blum, M. 2008. reCAPTCHA: Human-based character recognition via web security measures. Science.
[48]
Vrandečić, D., Gil, Y., and Ratnakar, V. 2011. Want world domination? Win at risk! In Proceedings of IUI. ACM, 323--326.
[49]
Wang, J., Ipeirotis, P. G., and Provost, F. 2011. Managing crowdsourcing workers. In Proceedings of Winter Conference on Business Intelligence.
[50]
Weisberg, R. W. 1999. Creativity and knowledge: A challenge to theories. In Handbook of Creativity, Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, UK, 226--250.
[51]
Yorke-Smith, N., Saadati, S., Myers, K., and Morley, D. 2009. Like an Intuitive and Courteous Butler: A Proactive Personal Agent for Task Management. SRI’s Artificial Intelligence Center.
[52]
Zhang, H., Law, E., Gajos, K., Horvitz, E., Miller, R., and Parkes, D. 2012. Human computation tasks with global constraints. In Proceedings of CHI.

Cited By

View all

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction  Volume 20, Issue 5
November 2013
129 pages
ISSN:1073-0516
EISSN:1557-7325
DOI:10.1145/2533682
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 November 2013
Accepted: 01 March 2013
Revised: 01 February 2013
Received: 01 June 2012
Published in TOCHI Volume 20, Issue 5

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Crowdsourcing
  2. Task management
  3. action plans
  4. implementation intentions
  5. time management

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed

Funding Sources

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)66
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4
Reflects downloads up to 21 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

View Options

Login options

Full Access

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media