News

We have published the first year of ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS), and it is going strong! TiiS has the goal of encouraging and disseminating research that combines methods and ideas from artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Further information, and a link to Manuscript Central for submitting your paper, is available at: TiiS Home Page

IEEE Social Computing Columns

I was invited to edit a column about social computing for IEEE Computer magazine. The column publishes short articles (2000 words) about interesting developments in social computing. The model is to find a few interesting research papers, relate them to activity going on in the commercial side of the social web, and then gaze into the crystal ball to try to predict the future. Most of the articles I co-author with a colleague, but for a couple of them I've invited someone to write a whole column on their own. Feel free to email me a column idea. An abstract is best, rather than a full column, so I can help you develop the idea if it's in the right direction. The articles are great fun to write -- and some people say they're fun to read, too. The complete list of articles is:

Crowdsourcing Medical Research

Bots and Cyborgs: Wikipedia's Immune System

Are Our Online "Friends" Really Friends?

Crowdsourcing Maps

Let's Gang Up on Cyberbullying

Expressing My Inner Gnome: Appearance and Behavior in Virtual Worlds

Folksonomy Formation

The Past, Present, and Future of Wikipedia

The Promise and Peril of Social Computing

I've given links to the IEEE Explore site, which I think is the place that knows about most organizational subscriptions to IEEE Computer. I find the IEEE Computer approach to subscriptions confusing, though: in your organization there may be another place to get to the free copies. Often Google Scholar is the best way to find the articles.

Research Interests

My research focus is on collaborative systems that support human interaction through computer systems. My career goal is to understand how to develop and apply computer technology to the problems of human organizations.

One of the biggest such problems is getting the right information to the right people. The Internet has democratized the publishing process. Now, anyone who wants can publish anything they want, just by creating a Web site. We humans are hopelessly overmatched by the increasing volumes of information that are published. Collaborative filtering is a technology that enables us to all work together to sift through the millions of documents on any topic to find those that are most appropriate for each of us. Collaborative filtering works by learning which kinds of documents each of us likes, and finding other people who share out interests.

Across our entire research program, our goal is to understand how computers can be used to help people process information more efficiently, and work together better.

I am currently involved in several research projects to explore these topics.