Ken Hinckley, Koji Yatami, and several other people from MSR published an interesting analysis of how to combine pen and touch input on table-top displays. The work draws inspiration from observations of how people manipulate paper to derive design guidelines for bi-manual and bi-modal interaction. The paper contributes a thorough description of integrated touch and pen-based interaction and offers a thorough analysis of design principles that underlie these kinds of interactions.

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Michael Bernstein and a cast of thousands published an interesting paper at UIST 2010, which was honored with the Best Student Paper award. The paper describes and evaluates Soylent, a tool that uses Mechanical Turk to generate corrections and suggestions to improve writing. (The name Soylent is not a substitute for dairy in the weeks leading up to Easter; rather, it is derived from the film Soylent Green.)

This work is interesting in a number of ways: it automates the distribution and collection of Mechanical Turk tasks and then integrates the results into an interactive system, it recognizes the limitations of fully-automated approaches, and it suggests a design pattern that can be applied in other contexts .

The main contribution of this paper is the idea of embedding paid crowd workers in an interactive user interface to support complex cognition and manipulation tasks on demand. These crowd workers do tasks that computers cannot reliably do automatically and the user cannot easily script.

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