I'm a computer science researcher at Microsoft Research, broadly focused in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction and Social Computing. This means I design, build, and analyze computer systems that connect people to one another.

Over the last few years, I've been focused on building intelligent systems that explore the future of work and productivity. I co-led the team at Microsoft that developed Calendar.help, a human- and AI-powered meeting scheduling assistant. Our team partnered with Outlook to release Calendar.help as a publically available beta, enabling people to delegate their scheduling needs to our virtual assistant.

I'm also interested in social computing that leverages geospatial or physical affordances, especially in urban environments. Past projects in this area include Livehoods, Journeys & Notes, and Curated City.

Contact me at justin@cranshaw.me or @compurbanist.

Selected Publications full list of publications google scholar profile

Calendar.help: Designing a Workflow-Based Scheduling Agent with Humans in the Loop
Justin Cranshaw, Emad Elwany, Todd Newman, Rafal Kocielnik, Bowen Yu, Sandeep Soni, Jaime Teevan, Andrés Monroy-Hernández. CHI, 2017: Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Paper
Website
Journeys & Notes: Designing Social Computing for Non-Places
Justin Cranshaw, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, S.A. Needham. CHI, 2016: Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Paper
Curated City: Capturing Individual City Guides Through Social Curation
Justin Cranshaw, Kurt Luther, Patrick Gage Kelley, Norman Sadeh. CHI, 2014: Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Paper
The Livehoods Project: Utilizing Social Media to Understand the Dynamics of a City
Justin Cranshaw, Raz Schwartz, Jason I. Hong, Norman Sadeh. ICWSM, 2012: Proceedings of the Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs an Social Media.
Paper
Website
Slides
Video
Press
BibTeX
Best Paper Award

Former Interns apply for an MSR internship email me for more info

Amy Zhang
MIT — CSAIL
Tools for collaborative summarization of group discussion
Carlos Toxtli
West Virginia University
Bots for managing and tracking tasks within conversations
Joren Lauwers
MIT
Block programming language for building bots
Sandeep Soni
Georgia Tech
Natural Language Processing for automated meeting scheduling
Rafal Kocielnik
University of Washington — HCDE
Microtask workflow design for automated meeting scheduling
Bowen Yu
University of Minnesota
Data analytics and monitoring for automated meeting scheduling
Ali Alkhatib
Stanford University
Towards a worker-centric vision of platform labor

News

I wrote a story in the Harvard Business Review with Andrés Monroy-Hernández about how we built Calendar.help at Microsoft.
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In partnership with Outlook, we've released the Calendar.help as a private beta. If you'd like help scheduling your meetings, sign up with the code IceCreamCake.
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Our paper on two years worth of design and engineering towards building Calendar.help has been published in CHI 2017.
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The CMU homepage featured a story about my work on Urban Computing and Microsoft's Journeys & Notes release.
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Journeys & Notes is one of Gizmodo's favorite apps of the week!
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The app I built with Andrés and Sarah at FUSE Labs this summer is now available world wide on Android! Check out Journeys & Notes!
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I wrote a blog post about my MSR internship work on designing for non-places.
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Over the 2014 Summer, I'll be an intern at Microsoft Research, Fuse Labs, working with Andrés Monroy-Hernández on social computing for transportation.
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Our paper on Curated City was accepted to CHI 2014. Curated City: Capturing Individual City Guides Through Social Curation.
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New essay: Whose 'City of Tomorrow' Is It? On Urban Computing, Utopianism, and Ethics.
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I've been awarded a 2013-2014 Facebook Fellowship in Human-Computer Interaction.
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Our work introducing the Livehoods Project won the best paper award at ICWSM 2012!
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I was recently on the CBC Radio program Spark talking with host Nora Young about the Livehoods Project.
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I gave a seminar talk Microsoft Research in Redmond on Livehoods and a broader context for urban computing.
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Copyright 2017 by Justin Cranshaw.