Information Science Breakfast Series

Feb 2

Gilly Leshed

Dynamic feedback for enhancing collaborative behaviors in distributed groups

Collaboration technologies offer great promise for distributed group work. However, their full benefit can only be achieved by considering the social practices that emerge with these technologies. This research proposes using dynamic feedback as a means to improve collaborative behaviors and skills in distributed small groups. It examines various display prototypes and explores the effectiveness and interplay of two sources of feedback: peer evaluation and automated communication analysis.

Feb 9

Panelists:
Carl Lagoze
Paul Ginsparg
Jeff Hancock
Phoebe Sengers

IS Breakfast Panel: What is Information Science?

Our panelists will discuss their thoughts of what Information Science is, how it differs from their home disciplines, where IS came from and where it is going.

Feb 16

Carl Lagoze

Extending information interoperability to Complex Objects

Abstract:  Open access to scholarly materials is increasing due to the deployment of institutional repositories based on Fedora, Dspace, ePrints, and other software platforms.  In addition, interest in so-called "data driven scholarship" has led to scholarly artifacts, the constituents of these repositories, that are increasingly complex. Rather than being simply text-based, they combine text, data, simulations, and multimedia bound together via relationships such as workflow, provenance, and citations. The opportunity thus exists to create a networked scholarly communication system supporting new forms of recombination and dissemination of scholarly artifacts. This new paradigm requires a shared resource-based, rather than metadata-based, interoperability layer that supports access, reuse, and deposit of these objects. Through the support of the Mellon Foundation, a two-year international initiative to define this interoperability fabric began in October 2006. The effort is conducted under the umbrella of the OAI (Open Archives Initiative), is named ORE (Object Re-Use & Exchange), and is coordinated by Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel. This talk will describe the results thus far of this project, which include the preliminary definition of a complex document model layered over the web architecture.

Feb 23

Mar 2

Dima Epstein
Joshua Braun

"YOU" for President: Exploring possibilities of online political discourse.

In every election people complain about their choice of presidential candidates. Each person who runs has some character flaw, some issue stance that doesn't go over well. The WikiCandidate is a research project based on this basic intrigue: Free of practical constraints, who is (and can there be) a perfect presidential candidate?

The WikiCandidate project will consist of a website, available to the general public, on which users will design the political platform of a fictional presidential candidate. While visitors to the site will explicitly be made aware that the candidate is not a real person, the site will be formatted to resemble the political sites of real candidates. All the content on the site will be tied to a Wiki engine and editable by visitors.

We're interested to see, if people are able to design the "perfect" presidential candidate, what will they come up with. We're also interested, of course, to study the process by which people do or don't come to consensus on issues, and to see who will show up to the site.  Currently, we have identified six potential domains for research: Web Campaigns, Online Communities, Wikis, Online Civic Participation, Human-Computer Interaction, and Methods for Online Research.

We would like to use this opportunity to brainstorm about the technical and theoretical underpinnings of the study, from a point of view of information science, and to explore potential points of collaboration.

Mar 9

Jeff Hancock

The Truth about Lying in Online Dating Profiles

Online dating is a popular new tool for initiating romantic relationships, although recent research and media reports suggest that it may also be fertile ground for deception. In this talk I'll report on a project with Catalina Toma and Nicole Ellison (MSU) that uses a novel cross-validation technique for establishing accuracy in online dating profiles. Unlike previous studies that rely solely on self-report data, the present study establishes ground truth for 80 online daters’ height, weight and age, and compares ground truth data to the information provided in online dating profiles. The results suggest that deception is indeed frequently observed, but that the magnitude of the deceptions is usually small. As expected, deceptions differ by gender. Deception patterns suggest that when lying, participants strategically balanced the deceptive opportunities presented by online self-presentation (e.g., the editability of profiles) with the social constraints of establishing romantic relationships (e.g., the anticipation of future interaction).

Mar 16

Happy Spring Break

Mar 23

Happy Spring Break

Mar 30

Jim Ferwerda

Perceptual foundations and applications of image synthesis

The goal of realistic image synthesis is to produce computer graphics images that are faithful representations of real or modeled scenes. Over the past 30 years great progress has been made toward this goal with the development of physically-based image synthesis algorithms that accurately simulate the behavior of light in complex environments. Physically-based image synthesis has the potential to revolutionize the use of computer graphics in science, engineering, medicine, and other fields, because the images can be both accurate physical simulations and predictive visual representations of important phenomena. However several problems have limited its wider acceptance. First, modeling a scene can be a difficult and labor intensive process. Second, rendering algorithms are computationally expensive and often take hours to generate even a single image. Finally, once images have been generated, there is often no way to accurately reproduce them on conventional display devices. In this talk I will first describe research that addresses these problems by incorporating novel computational models of visual perception into the image synthesis process. I will then discuss how we have been using image synthesis techniques to develop new tools for the early detection of vision problems in children and new assistive technologies for the visually impaired.

Apr 6

Gueorgi Kossinets

Coordination, Reputation, and Article Quality in Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia written and edited by volunteers. Because all edits and discussions are automatically recorded, Wikipedia is a great data set with which to study collective action and coordination in the context of distributed collaboration systems. For example, how can reliable knowledge production be sustained in an open system that relies on uncoordinated, distributed efforts in the absence of a formal incentive structure? And to what extent does the quality of output derive from the attributes and social network positions of the contributors? In this talk I will describe preliminary findings from an analysis of the complete editing history of the English language Wikipedia from 2001 through 2006, which contains about 1.5 million articles edited by ca. 120,000 stable users. I will focus on the relationship between the social network of editors and the quality of entries they produce. In Wikipedia, high quality articles are selected through peer review; productive contributors receive token awards from other members of the community; and members interact with each other on discussion pages and by collaborating on the articles. One could expect that these mechanisms would lead to what I call "reputation clustering" in the network of wikipedians, whereby contributors proximate to well-regarded editors will tend to produce better work themselves. I will discuss both theoretical and practical implications of this phenomenon and describe a statistical model to predict article quality (in the sense of its likelihood to pass peer review) by incorporating contributors' reputation and network positions.

Apr 13

Apr 20

Phoebe Sengers
Kirsten Boehner
Janet Vertesi

How HCI Interprets the Probes

Cultural probes are a widely used technique for developing insights into user life and activities as input to design.  Originally inspired by situationist art practice as a radical alternative to standard design methods, they now have themselves become a relatively standardized.  In this talk, we trace how cultural probes have been adopted and adapted by the HCI community. The flexibility of probes has been central to their uptake, resulting in a proliferation of divergent uses and derivatives.  The varying patterns of adaptation of the probes reveal important underlying issues in HCI, suggesting underacknowledged disagreements about what interpretations are valid and about the relationship between methods and their underlying methodology.  With this analysis, we aim to clarify discussions around probes, and, more importantly, to stimulate reflection around how we define and evaluate methods in HCI, especially those grounded in unfamiliar conceptions of how research should be done.

Joint work with Paul Dourish

Apr 27