Justin Cranshaw

Justin Cranshaw is a social computing researcher at Microsoft Research.His work focuses on the emerging multi-disciplinary area of urban computing, which seeks to better understand and better engage with urban processes through new forms of ubiquitous and social computation. He is particularly interested how distributed labor platforms are impacting and transforming urban life. Justin was a recipient of Facebook Graduate Fellow in Human-Computer Interaction in 2013. His work on the Livehoods Project received a best paper award at ICWSM 2012 and was covered by the Wall Street Journal, the CBC, Fast Company, Wired, and others.

Toward a generalizable worker-centric peer economy platform
Over the last few years, we at Microsoft Research FUSE Labs have been doing and funding academic research on the “Sharing Economy.” Recently, we have been working with labor organizations on the design and implementation of a generalizable worker-centric peer economy platform, which would enable groups of workers to own, operate, and control the software that bridges service providers with those seeking their service. Our goal is to do for on-demand service marketplaces what Wordpress did for blogging, empowering labor organizations to control the means of production by determining the parameters and algorithms that govern peer economy markets.