Carlos Toxtli

Carlos Toxtli, Christopher Curtis, Saiph Savage

Crowdsourcing markets are expanding worldwide, but often feature standardized interfaces that ignore the cultural diversity of their workers, negatively impacting their well-being and productivity. To transform these workplace dynamics, this paper proposes creating culturally-aware workplace tools, specifically designed to adapt to the cultural dimensions of monochronic and polychronic work styles. We illustrate this approach with "CultureFit," a tool that we engineered based on extensive research in Chronemics and culture theories. To study and evaluate our tool in the real world, we conducted a field experiment with 55 workers from 24 different countries. Our field experiment revealed that CultureFit significantly improved the earnings of workers from cultural backgrounds often overlooked in design. Our study is among the pioneering efforts to examine culturally aware digital labor interventions. It also provides access to a dataset with over two million data points on culture and digital work, which can be leveraged for future research in this emerging field. The paper concludes by discussing the importance and future possibilities of incorporating cultural insights into the design of tools for digital labor.

Carlos Toxtli

The rapid advancement of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM), has the potential to revolutionize the way we work and interact with digital systems across various industries. However, the current state of software automation, such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) frameworks, often requires domain expertise and lacks visibility and intuitive interfaces, making it challenging for users to fully leverage these technologies. This position paper argues for the emerging area of Human-Centered Automation (HCA), which prioritizes user needs and preferences in the design and development of automation systems. Drawing on empirical evidence from human-computer interaction research and case studies, we highlight the importance of considering user perspectives in automation and propose a framework for designing human-centric automation solutions. The paper discusses the limitations of existing automation approaches, the challenges in integrating AI and RPA, and the benefits of human-centered automation for productivity, innovation, and democratizing access to these technologies. We emphasize the importance of open-source solutions and provide examples of how HCA can empower individuals and organizations in the era of rapidly progressing AI, helping them remain competitive. The paper also explores pathways to achieve more advanced and context-aware automation solutions. We conclude with a call to action for researchers and practitioners to focus on developing automation technologies that adapt to user needs, provide intuitive interfaces, and leverage the capabilities of high-end AI to create a more accessible and user-friendly future of automation.

David Shapiro, Wangfan Li, Manuel Delaflor et al.

The rapid development and adoption of Generative AI (GAI) technology in the form of chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude has greatly increased interest in agentic machines. This paper introduces the Autonomous Cognitive Entity (ACE) model, a novel framework for a cognitive architecture, enabling machines and software agents to operate more independently. Drawing inspiration from the OSI model, the ACE framework presents layers of abstraction to conceptualize artificial cognitive architectures. The model is designed to harness the capabilities of the latest generative AI technologies, including large language models (LLMs) and multimodal generative models (MMMs), to build autonomous, agentic systems. The ACE framework comprises six layers: the Aspirational Layer, Global Strategy, Agent Model, Executive Function, Cognitive Control, and Task Prosecution. Each layer plays a distinct role, ranging from setting the moral compass and strategic thinking to task selection and execution. The ACE framework also incorporates mechanisms for handling failures and adapting actions, thereby enhancing the robustness and flexibility of autonomous agents. This paper introduces the conceptual framework and proposes implementation strategies that have been tested and observed in industry. The goal of this paper is to formalize this framework so as to be more accessible.

Carlos Toxtli, Siddharth Suri, Saiph Savage

Crowdsourcing markets provide workers with a centralized place to find paid work. What may not be obvious at first glance is that, in addition to the work they do for pay, crowd workers also have to shoulder a variety of unpaid invisible labor in these markets, which ultimately reduces workers' hourly wages. Invisible labor includes finding good tasks, messaging requesters, or managing payments. However, we currently know little about how much time crowd workers actually spend on invisible labor or how much it costs them economically. To ensure a fair and equitable future for crowd work, we need to be certain that workers are being paid fairly for all of the work they do. In this paper, we conduct a field study to quantify the invisible labor in crowd work. We build a plugin to record the amount of time that 100 workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk dedicate to invisible labor while completing 40,903 tasks. If we ignore the time workers spent on invisible labor, workers' median hourly wage was $3.76. But, we estimated that crowd workers in our study spent 33% of their time daily on invisible labor, dropping their median hourly wage to $2.83. We found that the invisible labor differentially impacts workers depending on their skill level and workers' demographics. The invisible labor category that took the most time and that was also the most common revolved around workers having to manage their payments. The second most time-consuming invisible labor category involved hyper-vigilance, where workers vigilantly watched over requesters' profiles for newly posted work or vigilantly searched for labor. We hope that through our paper, the invisible labor in crowdsourcing becomes more visible, and our results help to reveal the larger implications of the continuing invisibility of labor in crowdsourcing.

Carlos Toxtli, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Justin Cranshaw

Effective task management is essential to successful team collaboration. While the past decade has seen considerable innovation in systems that track and manage group tasks, these innovations have typically been outside of the principal communication channels: email, instant messenger, and group chat. Teams formulate, discuss, refine, assign, and track the progress of their collaborative tasks over electronic communication channels, yet they must leave these channels to update their task-tracking tools, creating a source of friction and inefficiency. To address this problem, we explore how bots might be used to mediate task management for individuals and teams. We deploy a prototype bot to eight different teams of information workers to help them create, assign, and keep track of tasks, all within their main communication channel. We derived seven insights for the design of future bots for coordinating work.