Rajan Vaish certifies that Paul Abhratanu participated in the Aspiring Researchers Challenge, an online research program run by Stanford University and UC Santa Cruz. The program invited students to join weekly meetings mediated by faculty to set the research direction for student teams. Paul was one of the most active students and co-authored a paper submitted to ACM CSCW 2017. The research direction was designing the next generation crowdsourcing platform to address issues with existing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk and improve work quality, fair wages, and task authoring.

1. Rajan Vaish
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Management Sci. & Engineering
rvaish@stanford.edu
Huang Engineering Center, 475 Via Ortega, Stanford, CA 94305-4124 T 831.229.7361
March 13, 2016
Dear colleagues,
This is to certify that Paul Abhratanu, a B.Tech student at Jaypee Institute of Information Technology Noida, India is
participating in the Aspiring Researchers Challenge - an online research program conducted by the University of
California, Santa Cruz and Stanford University. I helped co-organize this initiative.
This online research program invited students who wanted experience with research to join. There are weekly
meetings mediated by faculty, with students actively participating in setting the research direction. Student teams
do all actual research work. Students submit reports on their weekly work and other students review this work with
the top work earning a place in the weekly videoconference discussions. The top reports have been outstanding,
submitted weekly, and done out of interest alone since no class grade is attached to them.
The research direction is “Design the Next-Generation Crowdsourcing Platform” in the space of human-computer
interaction (HCI), exploring a self-governed crowdsourcing marketplace designed to amplify trust in crowd work.
Whether we need help with gathering data, labeling machine learning training examples, running experiments, or
transcribing audio, we turn today to crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com).
However, these platforms are notoriously bad at ensuring work quality, producing fair wages for workers, and
making it easy to author effective tasks. It's not hard to imagine that we could do better. As part of this initiative,
student teams investigate the possibilities, and developed Daemo - www.daemo.stanford.edu. The novel scholarly
work from this program will result in top tier publications in future.
Paul is one of the most active students in the program, and is a co-author in one of the papers that we submitted at
ACM CSCW 2017. If you have any questions regarding Paul’s participation, please contact me to learn more.
Sincerely,
Rajan Vaish