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Schedule
Note: Most events will take place in Art-Sociology Building, room 2309. Lunch and dinner will be available in the 3rd floor courtyard. Workshops will take place in the OACS Lab in LeFrak.
Monday, August 22nd
Travel Day
6:30 PM Meetup at Cornerstone Grill & Loft
7325 Baltimore Avenue, College Park, MD 20740-3235. Map.
Tuesday, August 23rd
8:00 AM Breakfast
9:00 AM Introduction and Announcements: Ben Shneiderman, Presider
9:15 AM - 10:15 AM Presentation:
Ben Shneiderman and Jenny Preece
Introduction to Technology-Mediated Social Participation
Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis, Flickr, and YouTube have garnered a billion users and their popularity is spreading rapidly, particularly on mobile devices. Technology-mediated social participation (TMSP) is a useful term for describing how these social media tools, user-generated content sites, discussion groups, problem reporting, and volunteer systems can be applied to national priorities. Provocative examples suggest transformative applications for healthcare/wellness, disaster response, energy sustainability, cost-effective education, and economic health. Additional new missions for these sociotechnical infrastructures include cultural heritage, political participation, environment/climate protection, public safety, international development, and local civic involvement. While community activists and government staffers are dealing with many practical implementation aspects, these social media applications represent an exciting research topic for computer, information, and social scientists. We will describe research opportunities and methodologies that are appropriate, and how TMSP can become a larger part of the national research agenda and academic disciplines.
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM Presentation:
Tom Malone (MIT)
Mapping the Genomes of Collective Intelligence
This talk will describe some of the key design patterns that underlie new kinds of collective intelligence, including especially systems for Technology-Mediated Social Participation (TMSP). Drawing on examples like Wikipedia, Linux, Google, and prediction markets, the talk will (a) give examples of key design patterns (b) suggest conditions under which different patterns are useful, and (c) show how different patterns can be combined and recombined.
A primary goal of this work is to develop principles for designing both the software and the other organizational elements needed for successful TMSP.
11:15 AM - 12:15 PM Presentation:
Eszter Hargittai
Persisting Digital Inequality
While academics who study the social implications of the Internet are often well-versed with digital media, such Web savvy is not universally applicable across the population. Although the majority of Americans are online, they vary considerably when it comes to their Internet skills. This presentation will discuss various methods used to study Web know-how from in-person observations to surveys. The talk will examine what factors explain differences in people’s Web-use skills showing that there is a persisting second-level digital divide across the population with those in more privileged positions better poised to benefit from their digital media uses than their less privileged counterparts.
12:15 PM - 1:45 PM Lunch
1:45 PM - 2:15 PM Presentation:
Jonathan Lazar (Computer & Information Sciences, Towson University)
Preventing Technology-Mediated Societal Discrimination: Accessible Design for Including People with Disabilities
Technical standards already exist to make nearly every type of technology accessible for people with perceptual and motor disabilities, while research is underway to better understand design for cognitive disabilities. Despite the existing resources and knowledge, many federal web sites are inaccessible for people with disabilities, denying them the access to important information. Social media tools tend to be inaccessible, cutting people with disabilities out of the chance to socialize with friends and contribute to important discussions, both interpersonal and societal. E-commerce web sites are inaccessible, often meaning that people with disabilities are denied the online-only discounts available on the web. Online employment applications are often inaccessible, denying people with disabilities the ability to apply for jobs on an equal footing. Technology on campuses, e-book readers, airport kiosks, the list of inaccessible technology goes on and on, depsite the fact that accessible technology is possible using existing technical standards. If Technology-Mediated Societal Participation is to truly be participatory, all aspects of it need to be designed in an inclusive manner, to allow all members of society to truly PARTICIPATE. This presentation will provide an overview of interface accessibility for people with disabilities: technical standards, laws, and user-centered design processes to ensure that Technology-Mediated Societal Participation is truly participatory.
2:15 PM - 2:45 PM Presentation:
Corine Bickley (Sorenson Language & Communication Center, Gallaudet)
Deaf Friendliness of Social Media
Deaf individuals and others who have been left behind in our technology-mediated new world deserve to have their views heard. Technology can address their problems -- problems which have in common a neglect for other views, other than the mainstream view. I will highlight the ways in with social media is being used, and may be used, for these populations. Highlights will include "work-arounds" that deaf individuals have utilized, as well as plans by cognitively-competent caregivers for support for their cognitively-weak seniors, that need modification.
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM Presentation:
Loren Terveen (University of Minnesota)
If You Build It? Benefits and Costs of Creating Your Own Online Community
The GroupLens Research Group at the University of Minnesota has a tradition of creating online communities that it uses as research platforms. MovieLens is the most famous and successful example, and Cyclopath is recent example. In this talk, I will describe both the benefits and costs of this approach for researchers, structuring my presentation around a number of specific research projects carried out on these online community platforms.
3:45 PM - 4:00 PM Break
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM Workshop 1 & 2 Group A & B: Alan, Marc
5:00 PM - 6:00 PM Workshop 1 & 2 Group A & B: Alan, Marc
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM Group Dinner: Crab Picnic
8:30 PM Evening Network Salon: Student Panel #1 (Sarita Yardi, PJ Rey)
Wednesday, August 24th
8:00 AM Breakfast
9:00 AM Introduction and Announcements: Alan Neustadtl, Presider
9:15 AM - 10:15 AM Presentation:
Ben Bederson (Computer Science, UMD)
Translation by Collaboration among Monolingual Users
Human translation is expensive and slow, and often unavailable between uncommon language pairs. Machine translation is inexpensive and fast, but quality is often unreliable. The space between these two alternatives remains virtually unexplored.
We have been exploring a new division of labor between people and machines, in an effort to reach available, cost effective, high quality translation. We describe a new iterative translation process designed to leverage the massive number of online users who have limited or no bilingual skill, by combining existing machine translation methods with monolingual human speakers. We are building a publicly available prototype on the Web that is capable of yielding high quality translations at drastically reduced expense. In this talk, we will describe our translation framework, how the system works, and describe experimental studies validating the approach.
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM Presentation:
Ed Chi (Staff Research Scientist, Google Research)
Model-Driven Research in Social Computing
Research in Augmented Social Cognition is aimed at enhancing the ability of a group of people to remember, think, and reason. Our approach to creating this augmentation or enhancement is primarily model-driven. Our system developments are informed by models such as information scent, sensemaking, information theory, probabilistic models, and more recently, evolutionary dynamic models. These models have been used to understand a wide variety of user behaviors, from individuals interacting with social bookmark search in Delicious and MrTaggy.com to groups of people working on articles in Wikipedia. These models range in complexity from a simple set of assumptions to complex equations describing human and group behaviors.
By studying online social systems such as Google Plus, Twitter, Delicious, and Wikipedia, we further our understanding of how knowledge is constructed in a social context. In this talk, I will illustrate how a model-driven approach could help illuminate the path forward for research in social computing and community knowledge building.
11:00 AM - 11:15 AM Break
11:15 AM - 12:15 PM Presentation:
Noshir Contractor (Behavioral Sciences, Northwestern)
Understanding and enabling large socio-communication networks
Recent advances provide comprehensive digital traces of social actions, interactions, and transactions. These data provide an unprecedented exploratorium to model the socio-technical motivations for creating, maintaining, dissolving, and reconstituting multidimensional social networks. Multidimensional networks include multiple types of nodes (people, documents, datasets, tags, etc.) and multiple types of relationships (co-authorship, citation, web links, etc). Using examples from research in a wide range of activities such as disaster response, public health and massively multiplayer online games (WoW - the World of Warcraft), Contractor will outline a multi-theoretical multilevel model to help advance our ability to understand and enable multidimensional networks.
12:15 PM - 12:25 PM Short Talk
Erwin Gianchandani (Director, Computing Community Consortium, Computing Research Association)
Current CRA Activities
12:25 PM - 1:45 PM Lunch
1:45 PM - 2:25 PM Presentation:
Nicole Ellison (Telecomm, MSU)
Assessing the benefits of Facebook “Friends”: The social capital implications of Facebook-enabled communication practices
This talk will provide an overview of research exploring the social capital implications of social network site use. Specifically, I will report on new research that attempts to identify specific Facebook-enabled behaviors that contribute to users’ ability to access diverse perspectives, novel information, and social support. This research explores the link between bridging social capital levels and Facebook-related factors such as time on site, the number of Facebook Friends, and a set of behaviors we call “Signals of Relational Investment.” If time permits, I will also describe some of the methods we've used in the past and the challenges associated with them.
2:25 PM - 3:05 PM Presentation:
Cliff Lampe (Telecomm, MSU)
Benefits and Challenges to Living Laboratories as Social Media Research Site
I will discuss the benefits and deficits of using a mature social media site as a "living laboratory", meaning a site where users have granted their permission to use the site for research purposes. Benefits can include access to rare longitudinal data, ability to experiment with tools, access to diverse participants, and great ground validity. Deficits can include cost of maintaining the site, both in terms of resources and management, additional ethical considerations, and working on a site that's not well known.
3:05 PM - 3:45 PM ?
3:45 PM - 4:00 PM Break
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM Workshop 1 & 2 Group A & B: Alan and Marc and Derek
5:00 PM - 6:00 PM Workshop 1 & 2 Group A & B: Alan and Marc and Derek
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM Group Dinner
8:30 PM Evening Network Salon: Student Panel #2
Thursday, August 25th
8:00 AM Breakfast
9:00 AM Introduction and Announcements:
Ben Shneiderman, Introduction
Brad Hesse, Presider
9:15 AM - 10:15 AM Presentation:
Sylvia Chou (NIH/NCI)
Social media for health communication: Data from the Health Communication National Trends Survey
This presentation will review current data on social media participation across the US, with special emphasis on health-related implications, including health information access, attitudes and behaviors related to health (cancer in particular), as well as health care utilization. Cancer survivors' use of social media and health information technology will also be reported. After highlight key findings from the NCI-sponsored Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS), I will discuss the potentials for health communication efforts to harness the power of social media to improve health and health care and to narrow the digital divide.
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM Presentation:
Brad Hesse (Chief, Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch, NCI, NIH)
The Promise of Collective Intelligence in Health and Healthcare
The topic of health goes well beyond the purview of any one individual. Sharing information efficiently within the healthcare systems may make the difference between catching a disease early, when it can still be treated effectively; and catching it late, when damage may already be done or the condition is impossible to treat. Likewise, social support in families may make the difference between getting the help needed to manage a healthy lifestyle and giving in to the entropy of an unhealthy environment. This session will present some of the early evidence collected by researchers at the U.S.-based National Institutes of Health on how participative technologies can be exploited to help individuals and communities live longer, healthier lives. Special attention will be given to the overarching concept of “collective intelligence in health,” or how aspects of a new participative Web can be brought together to solve some of the more significant health problems facing us today, such as that pernicious set of diseases known as cancer.
11:00 AM - 11:15 AM Break
11:15 AM - 12:15 PM: Presentation:
Robert Kraut (Professor, CMU)
Developing commitment in online communities
The development of commitment is a problem in many online communities; the majority of participants leave after a single visit. Psychological theories help explain when newcomers will become committed. This talk describes several empirical studies in Usenet, Wikipedia, World of Warcraft and breast cancer forums investigating how the initial interactions that newcomers have with others shape their subsequent participation. It demonstrates the usefulness of machine learning for automatically coding the nature of these interactions. It illustrates how psychological theories can be used to design online communities to increase commitment.12:15 - 1:45 PM Lunch
1:45 PM - 3:45 PM Travel to New America Foundation
3:45 PM - 4:00 PM Break
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
New America Foundation Special Event
In cooperation with the University of Maryland
Thursday August 25, 2011, 4-6pm
NAF, 1899 L Street, NW - Suite 400, Washington, DC 20036
Technology-Mediated Social Participation: From Research Agenda to Policy Initiative
Organized by Tom Glaisyer, NAF Knight Media Policy Fellow, Open Technology Initiative
Introduction
- Tom Glaisyer
Part 1: Speakers
- Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project
- Ginny Hunt, Google
- Prof. Michael Nelson, Georgetown University
Part 2: Case Studies
- Digital Innovations in International Broadcasting - Robert Bole and Raina Kumra, Co-Directors, Co-Directors Digital Innovations, Office of New Media, Broadcasting Board of Governors
- Commotion Project - Andrew Reynolds, Josh King, Sascha Meinrath, Open Technology Initiative, New America Foundation
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM Group Dinner @ Buca di Beppo, 1825 Connecticut Ave NW
8:30 PM Summer evening around Dupont Circle in Washington D.C.
Friday, August 26th
8:00 AM Breakfast
9:00 AM Introduction and Announcements:
Marc Smith, Presider
9:15 AM - 10:15 AM Presentation:
Mugizi Robert Rwebangira (Howard University)
In order for citizens to be able to influence their government they first have to be able to understand what it is doing. One good starting point is to understand the votes being taken by elected representatives.
In this talk I will survey some techniques that can be used to summarize the votes taken by a legislative body. These kind of methods allow meaningful comparison of the voting records of different legislators based on their actual votes and not simply on their public statements or opinions of third parties.
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM Presentation:
Jen Golbeck (UMD)
Politics on Twitter
Twitter has become an outlet for sharing information and communicating in a variety of contexts and the political arena is no exception. We present an overview of two studies on the use of Twitter in this arena. First, we present a study of how members of US Congress members use twitter. Then, as many media outlets create online personas, we seek to automatically estimate the political preferences of their audience, rather than of the outlet itself. We present a novel method for computing preference among an organization’s Twitter followers. We present an application of this technique to estimate political preference of the audiences of U.S. media outlets. We also discuss how these results may be used and extended.
11:00 AM - 11:15 AM Break
11:15 AM - 12:15 PM Presentation
Amy Bruckman (Georgia Tech)
Collaboration Online: Creative and Civic
Peer production of content has led to revolutionary successes like Wikipedia, YouTube, open-source software, and more. Yet we are still in the early days of understanding its potential, and how to deliberately engineer systems to make radically new things possible. Two types of online collaboration that are currently coming of age are creative and civic. In this talk, I'll first discuss leadership in creative collaboration online. How do groups of people work together to make creative products? Collaborative modes include remix, benevolent dictatorship, and open collaboration. How do these differ, and what constraints does each mode put on process and product? Can a group of people who have never met work together to create a product which is initially only partially described? What challenges do they encounter, and how can we help them overcome those challenges? Second, social media has controversial but potentially transformative potential for enhancing civic participation. I'll explain how the site iHollaback.org raises awareness of street harassment, and how this social movement has exploded to 40 cities worldwide in one year. Finally, I'll present new work in which Eric Gilbert and I are helping Public Broadcasting Atlanta to increase civic participation through our redesign of publicsquareatlanta.org.
12:15 PM - 1:45 PM Lunch
1:45 PM - 3:45 PM Presentation:
Lise Getoor (UMD)
Link Mining
In this talk, I will survey link mining methods from the machine learning and data mining communities, focusing on algorithms that can be especially useful for the rich, dyanmic, multi-relational data which is commonly encountered in social media. I will give an overview of several algorithms for inferring missing values, predicting future values, and correcting noisy information. Specifically, I will describe algorithms for entity resolution (figuring out when two references are referring to the same underlying individaul), link prediction (predicting when there is a link between two actors), and collective classification (predicting missing attribute values for individuals). In the conclusion, I will discuss connections and contrasts between link mining and privacy.
2:45 PM - 3:00 PM Break
3:00 PM - 4:30 PM Derek Hansen and Scott Golder, Vladimir Barash, John Kelly
Derek Hansen, BYU
Scott Golder, Social Media Research Foundation
Vladimir Barash, Morningside Analytics
John Kelly, Morningside Analytics
Mapping public discourse in social media: insights into collective movements People use social media to discuss all sorts of things, including politics. Looking at political discussions in particular, what can an empirical study of social media reveal about the ways public debate is carried out. Using data from the blogosphere and Twitter, this panel reviews the kinds of data, methods and insights made possible by study of social media content.
4:30 PM - 5:00 PM Closing Session
Summer Social Webshop Webmaster: PJ Rey
