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Arkose

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>


CommunityNetworkSimulator

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 >


Digital Memories

This project investigates  what will happen in the future as more "memories" become digital.  The Digital Memories project focuses on an understanding of how artifacts (heirlooms, souvenirs, photographs, photographs, correspondence, collections, and their digital analogs) play roles in people’s everyday lives and how memories are preserved through, embedded in, and carried by those artifacts.  More>


iDiag

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>


Pangmangi

In this project, we wanted to examine the role of art in information systems beyond its traditional design implications (such as effective communication and aesthetical decoration). We used the Pangmangi information display prototype to conduct group interviews with people from diverse backgrounds about how they viewed the use of art in the system. Our analysis uncovered ways that art is a versatile design medium due to its being socially, culturally, and contextually constructed.  More>


ProD

ProD is an opensource public display framework designed to simplify the task of building audience-aware public display applications.  Prospero provides abstractions for both the social and technical concerns for public display development, including extendable user profiles, recommender systems, context, privacy, and governance. More>


QuME

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>


Social Analyses of Online Communities

Under construction - only some projects are detailed here.
 


SSAPP

SSAPP is a Simple Sensor Architecture for Pervasive Prototyping.  There are many pervasive computing sensor architectures.  However, most of these systems are complex, and not easy for novice users to configure or use.  SSAPP is a simple sensor architecture designed to enable developers familiar with internet technologies to rapidly build and deploy pervasive applications.  More>