Edith Law

Biography

Dr. Edith Law is an Assistant Professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON, Canada.

Research Interest

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.