David Millen

Tufts University | Tufts · ME/HF

Social media has led to a data explosion and has begun to play an ever increasing role as a valuable source of information and a mechanism for information discovery. The wealth of data highlights the need for methods to filter and sort information in order to allow users to discover useful information. Most traditional solutions focus on the user,...

Social search has been claimed to improve content discovery by allowing users to draw on their social network to find relevant content. Thus social network information, complemented with metadata, can enhance the search for new information. We examine the relative contribution of social network information and file metadata in predicting downloads...

As more and more forms of AI become prevalent, it becomes increasingly important to understand how people develop mental models of these systems. In this work we study people's mental models of an AI agent in a cooperative word guessing game. We run a study in which people play the game with an AI agent while ``thinking out loud''; through thematic...

In the past few years there has been great optimism about the potential benefits of incorporating AI (cognitive) capabilities into healthcare products and services. Indeed, progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has made electronic health records both more accessible and comprehensible, advances in image processing algorithms has helped to e...

The use of mobile and social technologies has been recognized as enhancing financial practices by both academics and multilateral agencies. But these are complex matters and their impacts are not always straightforward. Although much has been written about microcredit, more understandings of such practices are still needed. In this work, we investi...

In this paper we describe the design process of a multi-bot conversational system to assist people to make more informed decisions about finance. Several user activities were held to understand the experience of investment decisions, the opportunities to design financial cognitive advisers, and the user perceptions of such systems. Valuable informa...

In the cognitive-computing era, there will be many systems designed in which people will interact with agents in conversational dialogue applications. Increasingly we will see opportunities for multiple agent systems, with specialized domain knowledge, and different roles and motivations. We are specially interesting in understanding how social sig...

This paper will explore insights gathered from fieldwork activities in the Northeast Brazil to design a financial application to facilitate access to credit. We observed the everyday financial practices of small merchants, their social physical networks and mechanisms to promote trust in those communities. We observed a particular kind of transacti...

In this work we aim to investigate the way people behave and think about transactions in everyday life. In industrial lab research, it is not always possible to conduct full-scale ethnographic studies to understand people’s everyday practices in support of the development of new technologies or to understand the ways in which technology may improve...

In this workshop we consider new financial services from a CSCW and Social Computing perspective. We will bring together researchers, policy-makers and practitioners who are interested in new financial services such as mobile payments, digital money, microfinance, mobile commerce, and the adoption and use of these new services by special sub-popula...

The authors of this proposal are members of an informal committee currently planning CSCW 2017 in Brazil. As we get set for this event, it is paramount to enroll a broader number of CSCW researchers in Latin America (LA) in the broader CSCW community. CSCW research in LA has been active since the mid 1990's although largely disconnected from the br...

In this work, we aim to unveil the main social network mechanisms in a microfinance program in Brazil. We interviewed 12 merchants in their business in September 2014. They are solidary group members of a bank microfinance program in the Northeast of Brazil. The research was held in two places. The first was Fortaleza a capital city and an urban en...

A system, method and computer program product for displaying a conversation summary is provided. The method may include providing a graphical user interface (GUI) configured to allow communication between a number of users. The method may also include displaying an invitation to join a conversation at the graphical user interface from at least one...

The Workshop Program of the Program of the Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media was held July 11, 2013, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The program included four workshops, Computational Personality Recognition (Shared Task) (WS-13-01), Social Computing for Workforce 2.0 (WS-13-02), Social Media Visualization 2 (WS-13-03),...

In this case study, we present the results of a longitudinal study of the end-user adoption of social software within a large global enterprise. Existing Technology Adoption Models (e.g., UTAUT) were extended and used as a general framework for studying user adoption. Several "best practices" to promote end-user adoption are identified and discusse...

Embodiments of the present invention address deficiencies of the art in respect to social media navigation in a social network and provide a method, system and computer program product for user pivot for media sharing in a social network. In an embodiment of the invention, a social networking data processing system for user pivot navigation. The sy...

Gamification, the use of game mechanics in non-gaming applications, has been applied to various systems to encourage desired user behaviors. In this paper, we examine patterns of user activity in an enterprise social network service after the removal of a points-based incentive system. Our results reveal that the removal of the incentive scheme did...

In globally distributed enterprises, face-to-face communica-tion of the norms and values underlying organizational cul-ture may not be feasible. As a result, enterprises have turned to social media as a potential resource for acculturation, the process in which employees make sense of organizational culture. In this paper, we explore the emergence...

We present the system design and rational for a novel social microcalendar called Timely. Our system has been inspired by previous research on calendaring and popular social network applications, in particular microblogging. Timely provides an open, social space for enterprise users to share their events, socialize, and discover what else is going...

For large global enterprises, providing adequate resources for organizational acculturation, the process in which employees learn about an organization's culture, remains a challenge. We present results from a survey of 802 users from an enterprise social networking site that identifies two groups of employees (new to the company and geographically...

In this paper we feature a set of research projects done at several IBM Research laboratories across the world. The work featured here focuses on the topic of smart social collaboration, which studies, designs, and develops social collaboration principles and technologies that can help customize and enhance existing social collaboration tools to su...

There is a growth in the popularity of social file sharing systems. This paper describes the design of Cattail, a social file sharing system for the enterprise. Through a 'Recent Events' stream, Cattail supports social navigation and exploratory search by inferring relevant social connections rather than purely relying on user-specified contacts. S...

Blogs are an important platform for people to access and share information, particularly in corporate settings where users rely on these systems for their work. However, because a global enterprise is multilingual, not all employees can understand the shared information in these systems easily if the content is written in a user's non-native langua...

In this panel we will explore two distinct approaches to reach transferability currently prevailing in the HCI community. We will discuss epistemological differences and the strengths and criticisms of each approach. Importantly, we will discuss the implications for HCI research practice given this diversity of methodological approaches.

Social networking services (SNS) have been deployed within enterprises to encourage informal social interactions and information sharing. As such, users have turned to the status message functionality in a SNS for social information seeking by employing it as a medium for question asking. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study...

We investigate the impact of a discussion snippet's overall sentiment on a user's willingness to read more of a discussion. Using sentiment analysis, we constructed positive, neutral, and negative discussion snippets using the discussion topic and a sample comment from discussions taking place around content on an enterprise social networking site....

Most knowledge repositories focus on the role of knowledge-creators. In this paper, by contrast, we examined the work of Lurkers in an enterprise file-sharing service, and we compared their lurking behaviors to the lurking behaviors of users who uploaded files (Uploaders), and users who contributed metadata about files (Contributors). For comparabi...

Web 2.0 tools are penetrating into organizations after their successful adoption in the consumer domain (e.g., social networking; sharing of photos, videos, tags, or bookmarks; wiki-based editing). Some of these new tools and the collaborative processes that they support on the large scale are often referred to as Collective Intelligence (CI). The...

Social networking sites have begun to be used in the enterprise as a method of connecting employees. Recommender systems may be used to recommend social contacts in order to increase user engagement, encourage collaboration and facilitate expertise discovery. This paper evaluates the effects of four recommendation algorithms on the network as a who...

We investigate the impact of a discussion snippet's overall sentiment on a user's willingness to read more of a discussion. Using sentiment analysis, we constructed positive, neutral, and negative discussion snippets using the discussion topic and a sample comment from discussions taking place around content on an enterprise social networking site....

In this work we analyze the behavior on a company-internal social network site to determine which interaction patterns signal closeness between colleagues. Regression analysis suggests that employee behavior on social network sites (SNSs) reveals information about both professional and personal closeness. While some factors are predictive of genera...

How do people use an enterprise file-sharing service? We describe patterns of usage in a social file-sharing service that was deployed in a large multinational enterprise. Factor analyses revealed four factors: Upload & Publicize (regarding one's own files); Annotate & Watch (add information to files and maintain awareness); Discover & Tell (find f...

Blogging in the enterprise is increasingly popular and recent research has shown that there are numerous benefits for both individuals and the organization, e.g. developing reputation or sharing knowledge. However, participation is very low, blogs are often abandoned and few users realize those benefits. We have designed and implemented a novel sys...

Data sharing is an essential foundation of the scientific process for reasons of transparency and replication. In CSCW and HCI, large-scale studies of social interaction hold great promise for research. Unfortunately, to date, few data sets from the social web have been shared among the research community. To better understand why, we propose typol...

Social networking sites have been deployed within global enterprises to encourage informal communication and build social capital between its globally distributed members. Such interactions can potentially contribute to intercultural learning opportunities; however, it is unclear whether cross-geographical social contact consistently occurs. We pre...

There has been considerable recent interest in the use of Web 2.0/social software in organizational settings. In this talk, several IBM research projects will be discussed in which social software was tailored for business and deployed within a large global enterprise (IBM). These projects include a social bookmarking service (dogear), a lightweigh...

The panel will bring together an intentional variety of perspectives on the process and outcomes of tagging, within and without social networking. In particular, how the context is apparent in the vocabulary, language or classifications used in communication. At the individual or conceptual level, tags are seen as a means to avoid some of the issue...

In this paper, we focus on the role that photo viewing plays within a large distributed enterprise. We describe the results of an analysis of users' viewing behavior through log activity and semi-structured interviews with respect to a photo sharing application embedded within an internal social networking site. Specifically, we investigate how the...

We report on a social-software file-sharing service within a large company. User-created collections of files were associated with increased usage of the uploaded files, especially the sharing of files from one employee to another. Employees innovated in the use of the collections features as “information curators,” an emergent lead-user role in wh...

This paper describes a social network site designed to support employees within an enterprise in connecting and learning about each other through personal and professional sharing. We introduce the design concepts and provide a detailed account of the first three months of usage, involving nearly 300 users. Our findings suggest that employees find...

The value of enterprise social media applications, components, and users is difficult to quantify in formal economic terms such as Return On Investment. In this work we propose a different approach, based on human service to other humans. We describe a family of metrics, Return On Contribution (ROC), to assist in managing social software systems. R...

User profiles on today's social networking sites support only a small set of predefined questions. We report on an alternative way for users to richly describe themselves, by entering not only responses, but their own questions as well. Data from 10 months of usage shows that users of a social networking site created thousands of diverse questions...

The introduction of a social networking site inside of a large enterprise enables a new method of communication between colleagues, encouraging both personal and professional sharing inside the protected walls of a company intranet. Our analysis of user behavior and interviews presents the case that professionals use internal social networking to b...

Traditional social networking sites allow users to enter responses to a set of predefined fields when populating their personal profiles. In the system discussed in this work, freeform 'About You' entries allow users to craft their own questions / topics. We found that this kind of flexibility often leads to low content contributions and infrequent...

In this paper, we explore how a social bookmarking service is used to support knowledge sharing in a large enterprise. While there has been considerable interest in social bookmarking and collaborative tagging systems in recent years, very little is known about their actual usage. In this paper, we present the results of a field study of a social b...

Success and sustainability of social networking sites is highly dependent on user participation. To encourage contribution to an opt-in social networking site designed for employees, we have designed and implemented a feature that rewards contribution with points. In our evaluation of the impact of the system, we found that employees are initially...

Social tagging systems provide users with the opportunity to employ tags in a communicative manner. To explore the use of tags for communication in these systems, we report results from 33 user interviews and employ the concept of social roles to describe audience-oriented tagging, including roles of community-seeker, community-builder, evangelist,...

Social networking sites support a variety of shared content types such as photos, videos, or music. More structured or form-based social content types are not mainstream but we have started seeing sites evolve that support them. This paper describes the design and use of structured lists in an enterprise social networking system. As a major feature...

Expertise locator systems have been designed to help find experts within organizations. While there are many examples of these systems in the literature, there has not been any systematic analysis of the factors that predict whether a particular expertise search result will be selected for further exploration. This paper describes a study of 67 emp...

Knowledge workers perform many different activities daily. Each activity defines a distinct work context with different information needs. In this paper we leverage users' activity representations, stored in an activity management system, to automatically recommend resources to support knowl- edge workers in their current activity. We developed a c...

Motivating user participation is an important issue for the survival of social web and social software applications. In our previous work demonstrated that a point-based incentive encourages contribution to a social networking site. This paper presents a follow-up analysis after a full deployment of the incentive mechanism to the entire user commun...

In recent years, there has been tremendous growth in shared bookmarking applications. Introduced in 2003, the del.icio.us social bookmark website was one of the first of this kind of application, and has enjoyed an early and large base of committed users. A flurry of similar offerings has since been unveiled [see (Hammond, et al., 2005) for a recen...

Social networking websites are evolving into tools for people sensemaking by supporting the process a user goes through to understand who someone is and to determine how and why that user should interact with someone. Author Keywords Sensemaking, social networking.

Tagclouds are visual presentations of a set of words, typically a set of "tags" selected by some rationale, in which attributes of the text such as size, weight, or color are used to represent features, such as frequency, of the associated terms. This note describes two studies to evaluate the effectiveness of differently constructed tagclouds for...

The Malibu system provides peripheral access to andawareness of activities, tasks, social-bookmarkresources, and feeds to assist knowledge workers intheir activity-centric work. We describe theexperimental system, a usage scenario and somepreliminary usage data.

Knowledge workers often need to find, organize, and work with heterogeneous resources from diverse services, information stores, and repositories. This paper ana- lyzes two problems that knowledge workers frequently encounter: difficulty in finding all relevant resources across diverse services, and difficulty in formulating and executing searches...

As the use of social networking websites becomes increasingly common, the types of social relationships managed on these sites are becoming more numerous and diverse. This research seeks to gain an understanding of the issues related to managing different social networks through one system, in particular looking at how users of these systems presen...

We describe the Dogear Game, which works with an enterprise social bookmarking system. The game is designed to accomplish individual, collaborative, and organization goals. Individual players receive entertainment and learn about their colleagues' bookmarks. The player's colleagues receive recommendations of websites and documents of potential inte...

In this paper, we explore various search tasks that are supported by a social bookmarking service. These bookmarking services hold great potential to power- fully combine personal tagging of information sources with interactive browsing, resulting in better social navigation. While there has been considerable interest in social tagging systems in r...

Activity-centric collaboration environments help knowledge workers to manage the context of their shared work activities by providing a representation for an activity and its resources. Activity management systems provide more structure and organization than email to execute the shared activity but, as the number of shared activities increases, it...

We describe a social bookmarking service de-signed for a large enterprise. We discuss design principles addressing online identity, privacy, information discovery (including search and pivot browsing), and service extensi-bility based on a web-friendly architectural style. In addi-tion we describe the key design features of our implementa-tion. We...

Report for early dissemination of its contents. In view of the transfer of copyright to the outside publisher, its distribution outside of IBM prior to publication should be limited to peer communications and specific requests. After outside publication, requests should be filled only by reprints or legally obtained copies of the article (e.g. , pa...

Activity Explorer is the first product from IBM that supports the notion of activity-centric collaboration. This new collaboration paradigm organizes and integrates resources, tools, and people around the computational concept of a work activity, with the goal of increasing work quality and efficiency. In essence, activity-centric collaboration is...

As the number of alerts generated by collaborative applications grows, users receive more unwanted alerts. FeedMe is a general alert management system based on XML feed protocols such as RSS and ATOM. In addition to traditional rule-based alert filtering, FeedMe uses techniques from machine-learning to infer alert preferences based on user feedback...

In this paper, we explore the increasingly popular social bookmarking services. These services powerfully combine personal tagging of information sources with interactive browsing, which allows for improved social navigation. We examine the use of a social bookmarking service, deployed in a large organization, to understand how social navigation is...

One of the greatest challenges facing people who use large information spaces is to remember and retrieve items that they have previously found and thought to be interesting. One approach to this problem is to allow individuals to save particular search strings to re-create the search in the future. Another approach has been to allow people to crea...

Report for early dissemination of its contents. In view of the transfer of copyright to the outside publisher, its distribution outside of IBM prior to publication should be limited to peer communications and specific requests. After outside publication, requests should be filled only by reprints or legally obtained copies of the article (e.g. , pa...

This paper describes a new collaboration technology that is based on the support of lightweight, informally structured, opportunistic activities featuring heterogeneous threads of shared items with dynamic membership. We introduce our design concepts, and we provide a detailed analysis of user behavior during a five month field study. We present th...

The principle of information hiding has been very influential in software engineering since its inception in 1972. This principle prescribes that software modules hide implementation details from other modules in order to decrease their interdependencies. This separation also decreases the dependency among software developers implementing modules,...

Information hiding is one of the most important and influential principles in software engineering. It prescribes that software modules hide implementation details from other modules in order to decrease the dependency between them. This separation also decreases the dependency among software developers implementing modules, thus simplifying some a...

Chat Spaces are rich persistent chats that provide light-weight shared workspaces for small to medium-scale group activities. Chat Spaces can accommodate brief, informal interactions (similar to Instant Messaging), and can also support longer-term complex threaded conversations including large numbers of people and shared resources. Our design maps...

This demonstration presents a new hybrid collaboration technology that partakes of selected qualities of informal, ad hoc, easy-to-initiate collaborative tools, and more formal, structured, and disciplined collaborative applications. Our approach focuses on the support of lightweight, informally structured, opportunistic activities featuring hetero...

How much history of the dialogue should a chat client include? Some chat clients have minimized the dialogue history to deploy the space for other purposes. A theory of conversational coordination suggests that stripping away history raises the cost of conversational grounding, creating problems for both writers and readers. To test this propositio...

This paper describes a new collaboration technology that is carefully poised between informal, ad hoc, easy-to-initiate collaborative tools, vs. more formal, structured, and high-overhead collaborative applications. Our approach focuses on the support of lightweight, informally structured, opportunistic activities featuring heterogeneous threads of...

The principle of information hiding has been very influential in software engineering since its inception in 1972. This principle prescribes that software modules hide implementation details from other modules in order to decrease their interdependencies. This separation also decreases the dependency among software developers implementing modules,...

Organizations are increasingly providing Communities of Practice with resources to improve the exchange and flow of knowledge and information. However, as with any other significant investment, managers are naturally interested in, and are frequently called upon to justify, the impact that these communities have on individual performance, overall p...

In a time of rapid turnover in employment, companies must transform new hires into productive employees as quickly as possible. This process, known as on-boarding, usually focuses on providing new employees with the information they need to get their job done. But becoming an integral member of the group is much more complex. In this study, we adop...