The goal of iDiag is to foster community-wide, short-term brainstorming or discussion, on the order of days or weeks, and preserve that community knowledge. But an unstructured discussion will result in the standard nest of topics and messages. Therefore the project has created tools to help people distill the topics and messages from the discussion. The idea is be to create something that can be used for further reflection and discussion. iDiag consists of two tools - iDiag/CyberForum and iDiag/Consolidate More>

Help-seeking communities play an increasingly critical role in how people seek and share information online, forming the basis for knowledge dissemination and accumulation. We would like to find mechanisms to use the social network characteristics of these communities design new systems and algorithms.  However, differing network structures and dynamics will affect possible algorithms that attempt to make use of these networks, and little is known of these impacts.

We developed a CommunityNetSimulator (CNS), a simulator that combines various network models, as well as various new social network analysis techniques that are useful to study online community (or virtual organization) network formation and dynamics. More >

Expertise finders are an important class of collaborative recommendation systems, but they suffer from a general problem: Current expertise finders, both commercial and research, cannot infer expertise levels very well. Traditionally, expertise finders have relied on the standard information similarity measures (such as term vector comparisons). However, in general, knowing level of expertise for a potential information source is very important. The classical example is medical: If you are sick, you want to find a doctor with expertise, not merely someone interested in the topic.

QuME is a prototype middleware system that contains a number of mechanisms to facilitate expertise finding, expertise exchange, and social interaction for online communities and organizations. QuME includes novel mechanisms to infer expertise levels, making a larger range of social interaction possible.  More>

Online discussions such as a large-scale community brainstorming often end up with an unorganized bramble of ideas and topics that are difficult to reuse. A process of distillation is needed to boil down a large information space into information that is concise and organized. Arkose is a system-augmented approach to the problem - a set of tools with which human editors can collaboratively distill a large amount of informal information. More>