Andrew Koster
ABSTRACT
When people need help with day-to-day tasks they turn to family, friends or neighbours to help them out. Despite an increasingly networked world, technology falls short in supporting such daily tasks. u-Help provides a platform for building a community of helpful people and supports them in finding volunteers for day-to-day tasks. It relies on three techniques that allow a requester and volunteer to find one another easily, and build up a community around such provision of services. First, we use an ontology to distinguish between the various tasks that u-Help allows people to provide. Second, a computational trust model is used to aggregate feedback from community members and allows people to discover who are good or bad at performing the various tasks. Last, a flooding algorithm quickly disseminates requests for help through the community.
- Y. Li, Z. A. Bandar, and D. McLean. An approach for measuring semantic similarity between words using multiple information sources. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 15(4):871--881, 2003. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- N. Osman, C. Sierra, and J. Sabater-Mir. Propagation of opinions in structural graphs. In Proc. of ECAI 2010, volume 215 of Frontiers in AI and Applications, pages 595--600. IOS Press, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- u-Help: supporting helpful communities with information technology
Recommendations
Building a community of practice at the help desk
SIGUCCS '02: Proceedings of the 30th annual ACM SIGUCCS conference on User servicesCommunities of practice are becoming recognized in the business world as a way to share knowledge across organizational boundaries [4]. Communities of practice derive from the learning theory proposed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger called legitimate ...
Grassroots open, online, calculus help forums
CSCL'09: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Computer supported collaborative learning - Volume 1The emergence of free, open, online, help forums has transformed tutoring from a private and individual activity into a public and collective endeavor. These forums support asynchronous exchanges between individuals from around the world. Students visit ...
Scaffolded Help for Learning: How Experts Collaboratively Support Newcomer Participation in Online Communities
C&T '17: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Communities and TechnologiesOnline communities, often in the form of discussion forums, encapsulate the very notion of "doing good with technology" by serving as a conduit for help-seeking and problem-solving by users who volunteer their time and effort. One form of helping is ...
Comments