Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science and Applications
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Blacksburg, Va
2004
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Blacksburg, Va
2017-present
Assistant Professor
Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA
I conduct research and advise students in my group, the User
Agency Lab. I also teach a variety of classes.
2015-2017
Research Associate and Postdoctoral Scholar
Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA
I conduct research and advise and administer students under the
supervision of Professor John M. Carrol. I also teach one class
a year.
2012-2015
Research Scientist
Work Practice Technologies, Xerox Research Centre Europe
Meylan, France
Initiated, worked on, and led several research projects
supporting work practices including Tools for Crowdworkers.
2011-2011
Adjunct Professor
Virginia Western Community College
Roanoke, VA
Taught 28 undergraduates a course focused on SQL queries and schema design.
2010-2012
Research Assistant
Palo Alto Research Center
Palo Alto, CA
Built and maintained several research projects and studied how questions were answered in Stackoverflow and related websites.
2010
Summer Intern
Palo Alto Research Center
Palo Alto, CA
Built and evaluated the Mail2Wiki tool, a plugin for email that recommended related wiki pages for users and let them drag and drop content directly into the outline of the page.
2009-2012
Graduate Assistant Virginia Tech
Information Technology Group
Blacksburg, VA
Proposed, developed, and deployed
different tools for Virginia Tech, most notably the official Virginia Tech
iPhone application (Hokie Mobile).
2004-2009
Senior Software Engineer
Meridium
Roanoke, VA
Meridium is an Asset Performance Management company, whose software suite is used by large petrochemical companies such as Exxon. At Meridium, I led several projects and teams, I served as architect and lead developer for three applications.
At Pennsylvania State University
2015
CHS: Small: Sociotechnical Issues in Crowdwork (not awarded)
This proposal sought to understand and enumerate the breakdowns in the AMT marketplace and expand our analysis to other stakeholders and platforms. As workers and work providers actively engage in End User Development (EUD) activities, we proposed Participatory Design (PD) activities as our primary tool for investigating the issues of workers and work providers.
At Xerox Research Centre Europe
2015
Automatic Knowledge Generation and Curation Based on Multi-Channel Customer Support Interactions
7 Headcounts
This project leveraged crowdsourcing, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning to extract and curate knowledge from the different customer support channels (e.g.\ phone, forums, chat).
2014-2015
Tools for Crowd Workers
3 Headcounts
This project focused on building a set of tools for the crowdworkers on Amazon Mechanical Turk to help onboarding and locating new opportunities. The main result of this project was a set of tools called TurkBench.
2014
Supporting Self-organized Competitions between Call Centre Agents
4 Headcounts
This project built a system that supported ad-hoc competitions between agents (something we observed in our various studies), the system provided a high degree of flexibility in forming competitions and automated the administering of the competition. The features of this system were eventually included in the Xerox-wide platform for call center agents.
2014
Connecting Customer Concerns with Online Portal Usage
2 Headcounts
This project focused on better connecting the needs of customers, as expressed by their support calls, with the provided online portals. We uncovered several key missing or inadequate features and provided designs for each, the responsible product team entered these features into their development roadmap.
2013-2014
Personal Ongoing Performance Awareness for Call Centre Agents
5 Headcounts
This project included several formative ethnographic studies, which ultimately resulted in creating a system that provided each call center agent with feedback on their performance. This system was widely deployed within Xerox once the research portion of the project concluded.
2015
Excellence in Research Award from Xerox Research Centre Europe
I received this award due to my successful leadership of a research project that moved the research findings into a deployed product for Xerox.
2014
Nominated for Best Paper at WEBIST Conference
2011
Google Travel Fellowship
Sponsored by Google to attend the 2011 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. This invitation only award is given to around 50 students a year, and only two students at CHI.
2016
HCOMP - Remembrance: David B. Martin & his Ethnographic Studies of Crowd Workers.
Presented by Benjamin V. Hanrahan, Penn State University
I was invited to give an overview of the work that David Martin and I did at XRCE investigating the experience and practices of crowd workers.
Professional Activities \& Service
2016
Journal of Business Ethics
2016
ACM Transactions on Internet Technology
2016
ACM Transactions on Human Computer Interaction
2014-2016
Interacting with Computers
2011, 2014-2016
Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Area Chair, Track Chair, Senior Program Committee, and Program Committee
2017
Program Committee: International World Wide Web Conference
2016
Program Committee: AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing
2016
Program Committee: ACM International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces
2012-2015
Associate Chair for Works-In-Progress: ACM SIGCHI Converence on Human Computer Interaction
2011
Program Committee: Communities and Technologies
Reviewer for Conferences and Workshops
2016
ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems
2012-2016
ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Computer Interaction
2012-2016
ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
2011
ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Computer Interaction Works-In-Progress
University Related Activities
2017
Member of the Graduate Recruitment Committee
2016
Participated in Candidacy Examinations for the IST PhD program
2016
Member of Human Computer Interaction SIG at Penn State
2015-present
Faculty Member of the Graduate School
Ongoing
Ning F. Ma - Doctoral Student
Ongoing
Rebecca Jonas - Undergraduate Honors Thesis
Ongoing
Anna Miller - Undergraduate Honors Thesis
2016
Jeremy Hill - Masters Student
2016
IST 210: Organization of Data
This course aimed to give students a fundamental understanding of the database concepts and practical skills used in analyzing and implementing a wellÂdefined database design. In particular, students were provided with an introduction to physical database design, data modeling, relational models, logical database design, and the SQL query language.
2011
ITD 130: Database Management Software
Students in this course gained an introduction to normalization, structured query language, and an overview of the commercial databases available. This class is designed to give them an introduction into database theory including decision making and data manipulation. The course gave the students hands on experience with the most common databases in use today.
Submitted
Implicit and explicit collective definition of level of difficulty for metrics based competitions in call centers
Hanrahan, Benjamin Vincent and Castellani, Stefania and Colombino, Tommaso and Rozier, David
Submitted
Prescriptive analytics for customer satisfaction based on agent perception
Francois Ragnet, Stefania Castellani, Benjamin Vincent Hanrahan, Yves Hoppenot
2014
System to Support Contextualized Definitions of Competitions in Call Centers.
Stefania Castellani; Tommaso Colombino; Benjamin V. Hanrahan.
US 8917854 (Granted)
2017
Apparatus and method for generating a graphical representation to motivate employees in a call center.
Francois Ragnet, Yves Hoppenot, Benjamin Vincent Hanrahan, Stefania Castellani, Frederic Somat.
US Patent 9654632 (Granted)
2014
System and Method for Providing Mixed-Initiative Curation of Information Within a Shared Repository.
Gregorio Convertino, Ed H. Chi, Nicholas Kong, Benjamin V. Hanrahan, Guillaume Bouchard, Cedric Archambeau.
US Patent 8656286 (Granted)
2013
System and Method for Supporting Targeted Sharing and Early Curation of Information.
Gregorio Convertino, Ed H. Chi, Benjamin V. Hanrahan, Nicholas Kong, Guillaume Bouchard, Cedric Archambeau.
US Patent 8380743 (Granted)