Research interests
There is now an explosion of data to be mined - in business, in science and in health care - at a scale that is beyond the analytic capabilities of a single person and at a level of complexity that challenges even the most sophisticated algorithms. At the same time, human intelligence is massively distributed and now readily accessible, yet untapped: there are millions of people online each day, performing computational tasks as a by-product of searching for information, playing games, organizing personal data collections, and interacting with communities. Professor Law’s research focuses on human-in-the-loop systems and the design of new algorithms, interaction techniques and incentive mechanisms to harness human intelligence to tackle challenging computational problems. Her general approach is to study research questions in the wild, by building and deploying human computation (a.k.a. crowdsourcing) systems that engage crowds - from small groups to hundreds of thousands of people over the Web - to address important problems in Science and Public Health. Examples of such systems include volunteer-based citizen science platforms, games with a purpose, and large-scale collaborative planning systems.
Degrees and Awards
PhD Machine Learning (Carnegie Mellon University), MSc Computer Science (McGill University), BSc Computer Science (University of British Columbia)
CCC Challenges and Visions Track Best Paper Second Prize, 2013
CHI Best Paper Honorable Mention, 2012
CHI Best Paper Honorable Mention, 2009
Harvard CRCS Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2012
FQRNT Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2012-2014
Microsoft Graduate Research Fellowship, 2009-2010
NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship PGSD3 2006-2009
Industrial and sabbatical experience
Microsoft Research (Redmond WA, 2010)
Microsoft Live Labs (Bellevue WA, 2008)
Ubisoft Entertainment Inc. (Montreal, QC, 2005-2006)
IBM E-business Innovation Center (Vancouver BC, 2000-2003)
National Research Council of Canada (Ottawa, ON, 1999)
Sony (Tokyo Japan, 1998)
Representative publications
E. Law, B. Grosz, L. M. Sanders and S. H. Fischer. "SimplyPut: Leveraging a Mixed-Expertise Crowd to Improve Health Literacy." In AAMAS Workshop on Human-Agent Interaction Design and Models 2013.
E. Law, C. Dalton, N. Merrill, A. Young, K. Z. Gajos. "Curio: A Platform for Supporting Mixed-Expertise Crowdsourcing." In HCOMP 2013.
O. Amir, B. Grosz, E.Law and R. Stern. "Collaborative Health Plan Support." In AAMAS 2013. * Challenges and Visions Track, Best Paper Second Prize
H. Zhang, E. Law, K. Gajos, E. Horvitz, R. C. Miller and D. Parkes. "Human Computation Tasks with Global Constraints: A Case Study." In CHI 2012. * Best Paper Honorable Mention
E. Law and L. von Ahn. Human Computation. Morgan & Claypool Synthesis Lectures on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, edited by Ron Brachman, Tom Dietterich and William Cohen, June 2011.
E. Law. "Human Computation for Music Classification." In Music Data Mining, edited by T. Li, M. Ogihara and G. Tzanetakis. CRC Press/Chapman Hall, 2011.
E. Law, B. Settles, A. Snook, H. Surana, L. von Ahn and T. Mitchell. "Human Computation for Attribute and Attribute Value Acquisition." In CVPR Workshop on Fine-Grained Visual Categorization 2011.
E. Law, P. Bennett, and E. Horvitz. "The Effects of Choice in Routing Relevance Judgments." In SIGIR 2011.
E. Law and H. Zhang. "Towards Large-Scale Collaborative Planning: Answering High-Level Search Queries Using Human Computation." In AAAI 2011.
E. Law, B. Settles and T. Mitchell. "Learning to Tag using Noisy Labels." In ECML 2010.
E. Law, K. West, M. Mandel, M. Bay and S. Downie. "Evaluation of Algorithms Using Games: The Case of Music Tagging." In ISMIR 2009.
E. Law and L. von Ahn. "Input-agreement: A New Mechanism for Data Collection using Human Computation Games." In CHI 2009. * Best Paper Honorable Mention
J. Betteridge, A. Carlson, S. Hong, E. Hruschka Jr., E. Law, T. Mitchell and S. Wang. "Towards Never Ending Language Learning." In AAAI Spring Symposium on Learning by Reading and Learning to Read 2009.
E. Law, L. von Ahn and T. Mitchell. "Search Wars: A Game for Improving Web Search." In HCOMP 2009.
E. Law, A. Mityagin and M. Chickering. "Intentions: A Game for Classifying Search Query Intent." In CHI 2009 Work-in-Progress.
E. Law. The Problem of Accuracy as An Evaluation Criterion." In ICML Workshop on Evaluation Methods for Machine Learning 2008.
E. Law, L. von Ahn, R. Dannenberg and M. Crawford. "TagATune: a Game for Sound and Music Annotation." In ISMIR 2007.
