I'm a researcher at Microsoft Research working in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction, Social Computing, and Computational Social Science.

Currently, I'm working with colleagues to develop a new research initiative in the area of Urban Innovation. Broadly speaking, we seek to produce science and technology for a rapidly urbanizing world. We're pursuing two initial projects in this space. The first explores the development and deployment of low-cost environmental sensors for measuring urban pollution at a hyper-local scale. The second project aims to build an urban data infrastructure for producing new societal insights from various streams of city data. These are still early efforts, so look for updates from me on these two initiatives soon!

In my first few years at Microsoft, I was focused on building intelligent systems that explore the future of work and productivity. I co-led the research team that developed Calendar.help, a human- and AI-powered conversational assistant that lets people delegate their meeting scheduling needs to a virtual assistant over email. After transfering Calendar.help to Outlook, I worked on Tilda, a Slack plugin for helping teams collaboratively summarize their discussions.

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 pubs on google scholar

Understanding Professional Skill Development and Economic Inequality Across U.S. Cities Using Internet Search Queries
Shagun Jhaver, Justin Cranshaw, Scott Counts. ICWSM, 2019: Proceedings of the Conference On Web and Social Media.
To Appear
Forecasting U.S. Domestic Migration Using Internet Search Queries
Allen Lin, Justin Cranshaw, Scott Counts. WebConf, 2019: Proceedings of the Web Conference.
To Appear
Sketching NLP: A Case Study of Exploring the Right Things To Design with Language Intelligence
Qian Yang, Justin Cranshaw, Saleema Amershi, Shamsi T Iqbal, Jaime Teevan. CHI, 2019: Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
To Appear
Honorable Mention
Making Sense of Group Chat Through Collaborative Tagging and Summarization
Amy X. Zhang, Justin Cranshaw. CSCW, 2018: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work.
Paper
Website
Best Paper Award
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

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

Cyn Liu
Indiana University
Personal urban environmental sensing
Sai Gouravajhala
University of Michigan
Intelligent Relationship Management
Qian Yang
Carnegie Mellon University
Designing intelligent language-based experiences
Farnaz Jahanbakhsh
MIT — CSAIL
Understanding human biases in online rating systems
Shagun Jhaver
Georgia Tech
The geography of skill development across metropolitain statistical areas
Allen Lin
Northwestern
Forecasting human migration using Internet search data
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.
more info
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.