Crowdsourcing markets are expanding worldwide, but often feature standardized interfaces that ignore the cultural diversity of their workers, negatively impacting their well-being and productivity. To transform these workplace dynamics, this paper proposes creating culturally-aware workplace tools, specifically designed to adapt to the cultural dimensions of monochronic and polychronic work styles. We illustrate this approach with "CultureFit," a tool that we engineered based on extensive research in Chronemics and culture theories. To study and evaluate our tool in the real world, we conducted a field experiment with 55 workers from 24 different countries. Our field experiment revealed that CultureFit significantly improved the earnings of workers from cultural backgrounds often overlooked in design. Our study is among the pioneering efforts to examine culturally aware digital labor interventions. It also provides access to a dataset with over two million data points on culture and digital work, which can be leveraged for future research in this emerging field. The paper concludes by discussing the importance and future possibilities of incorporating cultural insights into the design of tools for digital labor.

Programmable microfluidic laboratories-on-a-chip (LoCs) offer the benefits of automation and miniaturization to the life sciences. This paper presents an updated version of the BioCoder language and a fully static (offline) compiler that can target an emerging class of LoCs called Digital Microfluidic Biochips (DMFBs), which manipulate discrete droplets of liquid on a 2D electrode grid. The BioCoder language and runtime execution engine leverage advances in sensor integration to enable specification, compilation, and execution of assays (bio-chemical procedures) that feature online decision-making based on sensory data acquired during assay execution. The compiler features a novel hybrid intermediate representation (IR) that interleaves fluidic operations with computations performed on sensor data. The IR extends the traditional notions of liveness and interference to fluidic variables and operations, as needed to target the DMFB, which itself can be viewed as a spatially reconfigurable array. The code generator converts the IR into the following: (1) a set of electrode activation sequences for each basic block in the control flow graph (CFG); (2) a set of computations performed on sensor data, which dynamically determine the result of each control flow operation; and (3) a set of electrode activation sequences for each control flow transfer operation (CFG edge). The compiler is validated using a software simulator which produces animated videos of realistic bioassay execution on a DMFB.

This paper introduces BioScript, a domain-specific language (DSL) for programmable biochemistry which executes on emerging microfluidic platforms. The goal of this research is to provide a simple, intuitive, and type-safe DSL that is accessible to life science practitioners. The novel feature of the language is its syntax, which aims to optimize human readability; the technical contributions of the paper include the BioScript type system and relevant portions of its compiler. The type system ensures that certain types of errors, specific to biochemistry, do not occur, including the interaction of chemicals that may be unsafe. The compiler includes novel optimizations that place biochemical operations to execute concurrently on a spatial 2D array platform on the granularity of a control flow graph, as opposed to individual basic blocks. Results are obtained using both a cycle-accurate microfluidic simulator and a software interface to a real-world platform.

BioCoder is a C++ library developed at Microsoft Research, India, for the unambiguous specification of biochemical assays. This article describes language extensions to BioCoder along with a compiler and runtime system that translate and execute assays specified using BioCoder on a software simulator. The simulator mimics the behavior of laboratories-on-a-chip (LoCs) based on a droplet actuation technology called electrowetting on dielectric (EWoD). To date, prior compilers targeting similar EWoD devices are limited to assays specified as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) and cannot handle arbitrary control flow or feedback from the LoC. The framework presented herein addresses these challenges through dynamic interpretation, thereby enlarging the space of assays that can be compiled onto EWoD devices.