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Publications (208)
Auditing the machine learning (ML) models used on Wikipedia is important for ensuring that vandalism-detection processes remain fair and effective. However, conducting audits is challenging because stakeholders have diverse priorities and assembling evidence for a model's [in]efficacy is technically complex. We designed an interface to enable edito...
Peer production platforms like Wikipedia commonly suffer from content gaps. Prior research suggests recommender systems can help solve this problem, by guiding editors towards underrepresented topics. However, it remains unclear whether this approach would result in less relevant recommendations, leading to reduced overall engagement with recommend...
Strategies for engaging in more ethical research with online communities.
Peer production platforms like Wikipedia commonly suffer from content gaps. Prior research suggests recommender systems can help solve this problem, by guiding editors towards underrepresented topics. However, it remains unclear whether this approach would result in less relevant recommendations, leading to reduced overall engagement with recommend...
Workplace bias creates negative psychological outcomes for employees, permeating the larger organization. Workplace meetings are frequent, making them a key context where bias may occur. Video conferencing (VC) is an increasingly common medium for workplace meetings; we therefore investigated how VC tools contribute to increasing or reducing bias i...
Workplace bias creates negative psychological outcomes for employees, permeating the larger organization. Workplace meetings are frequent, making them a key context where bias may occur. Video conferencing (VC) is an increasingly common medium for workplace meetings; we therefore investigated how VC tools contribute to increasing or reducing bias i...
Online health communities (OHCs) offer the promise of connecting with supportive peers. Forming these connections first requires finding relevant peers - a process that can be time-consuming. Peer recommendation systems are a computational approach to make finding peers easier during a health journey. By encouraging OHC users to alter their online...
Wikipedia -- like most peer production communities -- suffers from a basic problem: the amount of work that needs to be done (articles to be created and improved) exceeds the available resources (editor effort). Recommender systems have been deployed to address this problem, but they have tended to recommend work tasks that match individuals' perso...
Structured data peer production (SDPP) platforms like Wikidata play an important role in knowledge production. Compared to traditional peer production platforms like Wikipedia, Wikidata data is more structured and intended to be used by machines, not (directly) by people; end-user interactions with Wikidata often happen through intermediary "invisi...
From the earliest days of the field, Recommender Systems research and practice has struggled to balance and integrate approaches that focus on recommendation as a machine learning or missing-value problem with ones that focus on machine learning as a discovery tool and perhaps persuasion platform. In this article, we review 25 years of recommender...
Emoji are commonly used in modern text communication. However, as graphics with nuanced details, emoji may be open to interpretation. Emoji also render differently on different viewing platforms (e.g., Apple’s iPhone vs. Google’s Nexus phone), potentially leading to communication errors. We explore whether emoji renderings or differences across pla...
Recommender systems face several challenges, e.g., recommending novel and diverse items and generating helpful explanations. Where algorithms struggle, people may excel. We therefore designed CrowdLens to explore different workflows for incorporating people into the recommendation process. We did an online experiment, finding that: compared to a st...
In peer production communities, individual community members typically decide for themselves where to make contributions, often driven by factors such as “fun” or a belief that “information should be free”. However, the extent to which this bottom-up, interest-driven content production paradigm meets the needs of consumers of this content is unclea...
People from different cultures vary in cognition, emotion, and behavior. We explore cultural differences in a tagging system. We developed a model of cultural differences and performed a controlled empirical study with American and Chinese subjects to investigate questions that arise from the model. American and Chinese subjects differed in many wa...
Spirituality is an understudied topic in social computing; however, for Online Health Community (OHC) users facing life-threatening illness, it is of fundamental importance. Through in-depth focus groups with OHC stakeholders in a US context, we derive a definition of "spiritual support" for use by designers and researchers who study online social...
Online health communities offer the promise of support benefits to users, in particular because these communities enable users to find peers with similar experiences. Building mutually supportive connections between peers is a key motivation for using online health communities. However, a user's role in a community may influence the formation of pe...
Online health communities offer the promise of support benefits to users, in particular because these communities enable users to find peers with similar experiences. Building mutually supportive connections between peers is a key motivation for using online health communities. However, a user's role in a community may influence the formation of pe...
Researchers construct models of social media users to understand human behavior and deliver improved digital services. Such models use conceptual categories arranged in a taxonomy to classify unstructured user text data. In many contexts, useful taxonomies can be defined via the incorporation of qualitative findings, a mixed-methods approach that o...
On Wikipedia, sophisticated algorithmic tools are used to assess the quality of edits and take corrective actions. However, algorithms can fail to solve the problems they were designed for if they conflict with the values of communities who use them. In this study, we take a Value-Sensitive Algorithm Design approach to understanding a community-cre...
Artificial intelligence algorithms have been applied to a wide variety of tasks, including assisting human decision making in high-stake contexts. However, these algorithms are complex and have trade-offs, notably between prediction accuracy and fairness to population subgroups. This makes it hard for domain stakeholders to understand algorithms an...
Group projects are an essential component of teaching user interface (UI) design. We identified six challenges in transferring traditional group projects into the context of Massive Open Online Courses: managing dropout, avoiding free-riding, appropriate scaffolding, cultural and time zone differences, and establishing common ground. We present a c...
Bots have been important to peer production's success. Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, and Wikidata all have taken advantage of automation to perform work at a rate and scale exceeding that of human contributors. Understanding the ways in which humans and bots behave in these communities is an important topic, and one that relies on accurate bot recognit...
Emoji are popular in digital communication, but they are rendered differently on different viewing platforms (e.g., iOS, Android). It is unknown how many people are aware that emoji have multiple renderings, or whether they would change their emoji-bearing messages if they could see how these messages render on recipients' devices. We developed sof...
Most commonly used approaches to developing automated or artificially intelligent algorithmic systems are Big Data-driven and machine learning-based. However, these approaches can fail, for two notable reasons: (1) they may lack critical engagement with users and other stakeholders; (2) they rely largely on historical human judgments, which do not...
Peer production communities create valuable content such as software, encyclopedia articles, and map data. As part of the creation process, these communities define production standards for their content, e.g., semantic and syntactic requirements. We carried out a study in OpenStreetMap to investigate the role of that community's standards for geog...
The evolution of contributor behavior in peer production communities over time has been a subject of substantial interest in the social computing community. In this paper, we extend this literature to the geographic domain, exploring contribution behavior in OpenStreetMap using a spatiotemporal lens. In doing so, we observe a geographic version of...
This panel brings together senior and junior members of the HCI community to answer two questions: (1) What issues raised by the 2016 U.S. election need to be addressed by the HCI community? and (2) How can the HCI community address these issues and have real, substantive impact? The panel includes a novel audience participation component that seek...
Recent studies have found that people interpret emoji characters inconsistently, creating significant potential for miscommunication. However, this research examined emoji in isolation, without consideration of any surrounding text. Prior work has hypothesized that examining emoji in their natural textual contexts would substantially reduce potenti...
Recent studies have found that people interpret emoji characters inconsistently, creating significant potential for miscommunication. However, this research examined emoji in isolation, without consideration of any surrounding text. Prior work has hypothesized that examining emoji in their natural textual contexts would substantially reduce potenti...
In addition to encyclopedia articles and software, peer production communities produce structured data, e.g., Wikidata and OpenStreetMap's metadata. Structured data from peer production communities has become increasingly important due to its use by computational applications, such as CartoCSS, MapBox, and Wikipedia infoboxes. However, this structu...
Despite the geographically situated nature of most sharing economy tasks, little attention has been paid to the role that geography plays in the sharing economy. In this article, we help to address this gap in the literature by examining how four key principles from human geography—distance decay, structured variation in population density, mental...
Emoji are commonly used in modern text communication. However, as graphics with nuanced details, emoji may be open to interpretation. Emoji also render differently on different viewing platforms (e.g., Apple's iPhone vs. Google's Nexus phone), potentially leading to communication errors. We explore whether emoji renderings or differences across pla...
We introduce a theoretical framework called precision crowdsourcing whose goal is to help turn online information consumers into information contributors. The framework looks at the timing and nature of the requests made of users and the feedback provided to users with the goal of increasing long-term contribution and engagement in the site or syst...
Studies have shown that the recommendation of unseen, novel or serendipitous items is crucial for a satisfying and engaging user experience. As a result, recent developments in recommendation research have increasingly focused towards introducing novelty in user recommendation lists. While, existing solutions aim to find the right balance between t...
The essence of a recommender system is that it can recommend items personalized to the preferences of an individual user. But typically users are given no explicit control over this personalization, and are instead left guessing about how their actions affect the resulting recommendations. We hypothesize that any recommender algorithm will better f...
Different theoretical frameworks support the use of interactive websites to promote sexual health. Although several Web-based interventions have been developed to address sexual risk taking among young people, no evaluated interventions have attempted to foster behavior change through moderated interaction among a virtual network of adolescents (wh...
Peer production communities have been proven to be successful at creating valuable artefacts, with Wikipedia as a prime example. However, a number of studies have shown that work in these communities tends to be of uneven quality and certain content areas receive more attention than others. In this paper, we examine the efficacy of a range of targe...
Mobile crowdsourcing markets (e.g., Gigwalk and TaskRabbit) offer crowdworkers tasks situated in the physical world (e.g., checking street signs, running household errands). The geographic nature of these tasks distinguishes these markets from online crowdsourcing markets and raises new, fundamental questions. We carried out a controlled study in t...
Pinterest is a popular social networking site that lets people discover, collect, and share pictures of items from the Web. Among popular social media sites, Pinterest has by far the most skewed gender distribution: women are four times more likely than men to use it. To better understand this, we examined two factors that generally affect whether...
To achieve high quality initial personalization, recommender systems must provide an efficient and effective process for new users to express their preferences. We propose that this goal is best served not by the classical method where users begin by expressing preferences for individual items - this process is an inefficient way to convert a user'...
Wikipedia, the encyclopedia "anyone can edit", has become increasingly less so. Recent academic research and popu-lar discourse illustrates the often aggressive ways newcom-ers are treated by veteran Wikipedians. These are complex sociotechnical issues, bound up in infrastructures based on problematic ideologies. In response, we worked with a coali...
Eli Pariser coined the term 'filter bubble' to describe the potential for online personalization to effectively isolate people from a diversity of viewpoints or content. Online recommender systems - built on algorithms that attempt to predict which items users will most enjoy consuming - are one family of technologies that potentially suffers from...
Research on online communities raises a number of challenges. It is difficult to get access to usage data, to users (to interview), and to the system itself to introduce new features (e.g., participation incentive mechanisms). One solution is for researchers to create an online community themselves. Although this provides more control and access, i...
Pinterest is a popular social curation site where people collect, organize, and share pictures of items. We studied a fundamental issue for such sites: what patterns of activity attract attention (audience and content reposting)-- We organized our studies around two key factors: the extent to which users specialize in particular topics, and homophi...
The "real world" nature of field-based citizen science involves unique data management challenges that distinguish it from projects that involve only Internet-mediated activities. In particular, many data contribution and review practices are often accomplished "offline' via paper or general-purpose software like Excel. This can lead to integration...
Under contribution is an important problem in online social production communities: important tasks don't get done, and only a small minority of participants are active contributors. How can we remedy this situation? We explore the feasibility of using the act of consuming information as a gateway to contributing information; specifically, we inves...
Most people associate with people like themselves, a process called homophily. Exposure to diversity, however, makes us more informed as individuals and as a society. In this paper, we investigate political disagreements on Facebook to explore the conditions under which diverse opinions can coexist online. Via a mixed methods approach comprising 10...
In this paper, we build on our previous work by evaluating several approaches for assessing the skill of players and teams on the basis of both individual performance and group cohesion, or "team chemistry", using game data from the National Basketball Association (NBA). Previously developed for skill assessment in team-based multi-player video gam...
High turnover and under contribution are problems in many online communities, threatening their ability to provide resources for members and even their existence. This article describes two approaches for increasing attachment to online communities inspired by social psychological theory. With identity-based attachment, members feel connected to th...
Over the past decade, social network sites have become ubiquitous places for people to maintain relationships, as well as loci of intense research interest. Recently, a new site has exploded into prominence: Pinterest became the fastest social network to reach 10M users, growing 4000% in 2011 alone. While many Pinterest articles have appeared in th...
Geography is playing an increasingly important role in areas of HCI ranging from social computing to natural user interfaces. At the same time, research in geography has focused more and more on technology-mediated interaction with spatiotemporal phenomena. Despite the growing popularity of this geographic human-computer interaction (GeoHCI) in bot...
We (the authors of CSCWs program) have finite time and energy that can be invested into our publications and the research communities we value. While we want our work to have the most impact possible, we also want to grow and support productive research communities within which to have this impact. This panel discussion explores the costs and benef...
This poster describes the design of a novel route analysis tool based on a community-driven, geographic wiki to assist transportation planners to make better decisions. We highlight the advantages of our tool over other, similar ones---gained due to the use of a wiki-based platform---through a real-life usage scenario.
In open content communities like Wikipedia and StackOverflow and in open source software projects, a small proportion of users produce a majority of the content and take on much of the required community maintenance work. Understanding this class of users is crucial to creating and sustaining healthy communities. We carried out a mixed-method study...
Analysis of geographic data often requires matching GPS traces to road segments. Unfortunately, map data is often incomplete, resulting in failed or incorrect matches. In this paper, we extend an HMM map-matching algorithm to handle missing blocks. We test our algorithm using map data from the Cyclopath geowiki and GPS traces from Cyclopath's mobil...
Background: Innovative health service approaches are needed to promote healthy sexual development and relationships among youth and to prevent STIs and pregnancy. Methods: We conduct a summative process evaluation of TeensTalkHealth, an interactive website designed to promote healthy relationships and condom use. The 4-month website intervention fe...
The home wardrobe is a complex and variable system, interacted with daily by its user/manager in a time- and resource-constrained decision-making process. Ubiquitous computing technology offers advantages in augmenting the decision-making process, and the potential to simultaneously encourage sustainable behaviors. In this study we present an empir...
Online communities are increasingly important to organizations and the general public, but there is little theoretically based research on what makes some online communities more successful than others. In this article, we apply theory from the field of social psychology to understand how online communities develop member attachment, an important d...
Social psychology offers several theories of potential use for designing techniques to increase user contributions to online communities. Some of these techniques follow the "compliance without pressure" approach, where users are led to comply with a request without being subjected to any obvious external pressure. We evaluated two such techniques...
The HCI research community grows bigger each year, refining and expanding its boundaries in new ways. The ability to effectively review submissions is critical to the growth of CHI and related conferences. The review process is designed to produce a consistent supply of fair, high-quality reviews without overloading individual reviewers; yet, after...
Users have come to rely on automated route finding services for driving, public transit, walking, and bicycling. Current state of the art route finding algorithms typically rely on objective factors like time and distance; they do not consider subjective preferences that also influence route quality. This paper addresses that need. We introduce a n...
Corporate meetings are increasingly being held remotely using web technologies. With such remote meetings being recorded and made available after the fact, there is a pressing need for tools to access and utilize these recordings efficiently. Our work explores the utility of using annotations generated by meeting attendees to meet this need. We con...
Administrators of online communities face the crucial issue of understanding and developing their user communities. Will new users become committed members? What types of roles are particular individuals most likely to take on? We report on a study that investigates these questions. We administered a survey (based on standard psychological instrume...
People from different cultures vary in cognition, emo-tion, and behavior. We explore cultural differences in a tagging system. We developed a model of cul-tural differences and performed a controlled empirical study with American and Chinese subjects to investi-gate questions that arise from the model. American and Chinese subjects differed in many...
The WikiSym 2011 Doctoral Symposium was held as a preconference event on October 2nd, 2011 on the campus of Stanford Univesity. Accepted PhD students were invited to present their dissertation work and participate in discussions and feedback sessions with three faculty mentors:
• Loren Terveen, University of Minnesota
• Coye Cheshire, University of...
Ward Cunningham's vision for the wiki was that it would be "the simplest online database that could possibly work". We consider here a common manifestation of simplicity: the assumption that the objects in a wiki that can be edited (e.g., Wikipedia articles) are relatively independent. As wiki applications in new domains emerge, however, this assum...
Citizen science is becoming more valuable as a potential source of environmental data. Involving citizens in data collection has the added educational benefits of increased scientific awareness and local ownership of environmental concerns. However, a common concern among domain experts is the presumed lower quality of data submitted by volunteers....
Wikipedia has rapidly become an invaluable destination for millions of information-seeking users. However, media reports suggest an important challenge: only a small fraction of Wikipedia's legion of volunteer editors are female. In the current work, we present a scientific exploration of the gender imbalance in the English Wikipedia's population o...
Many people rely on open collaboration projects to run their computer (Linux), browse the web (Mozilla Firefox), and get information (Wikipedia). While these projects are successful, many such efforts suffer from lack of participation. Understanding what motivates users to participate and the benefits they perceive from their participation can help...
With the advent of digital video recorders and video-on-demand services, the way in which we consume media is undergoing a fundamental change. People today are less likely to watch shows at the same time, let alone the same place. As a result, television viewing which was once a social activity has been reduced to a passive, isolated experience. Co...
One critical question suggested by Web 2.0 is as follows: When is it better to leverage the knowledge of other users vs. rely on the product characteristic-based metrics for online product recommenders? Three recent and notable changes of recommender ...
Online communities produce rich behavioral datasets, e.g., Usenet news conversations, Wikipedia edits, and Facebook friend networks. Analysis of such datasets yields important insights (like the "long tail" of user participation) and sug- gests novel design interventions (like targeting users with personalized opportunities and work requests). Howe...
Open content communities such as wikis derive their value from the work done by users. However, a key challenge is to elicit work that is sufficient and focused where needed. We address this challenge in a geographic open content commu- nity, the Cyclopath bicycle routefinding system. We devised two techniques to elicit and focus user work, one usi...
We introduced tags into the Cyclopath geographic wiki for bicyclists. To promote the creation of useful tags, we made tags wiki objects, giving ownership of tag applications to the community, not to individuals. We also introduced a novel interface that lets users fine-tune their routing preferences with tags. We analyzed the Cyclopath tagging voca...
An online community is not sustainable unless at least a core of members participates and makes repeated visits. This article describes strategies for increasing commitment to online communities through two mechanisms inspired by social psychological theory – identity-based commitment, in which members feel connected to the group as a whole and its...
With the advent of digital video recorders and video-on-demand services, the way in which we consume media is undergoing a fundamental change. People today are less likely to watch shows at the same time, let alone the same place. As a result, television viewing which was once a social activity has been reduced to a passive, isolated experience. Co...
Open content web sites depend on users to produce information of value. Wikipedia is the largest and most well-known such site. Previous work has shown that a small fraction of editors --Wikipedians -- do most of the work and produce most of the value. Other work has offered conjectures about how Wikipedians differ from other editors and how Wikipe...
Scientific peer review, open source software development, wikis, and other domains use distributed review to improve quality of created content by providing feedback to the work's creator. Distributed review is used to assess or improve the quality of a work (e.g., an article). However, it can also provide learning benefits to the participants in t...
Many online mapping applications let users define routes, perhaps for sharing a favorite bicycle commuting route or rating several contiguous city blocks. At the UI level, defining a route amounts to selecting a fairly large number of objects - the individual segments of roads and trails that make up the route. We present a novel interaction techni...
Open content web sites depend on users to produce information of value. Wikipedia is the largest and most well-known such site. Previous work has shown that a small fraction of editors --Wikipedians -- do most of the work and produce most of the value. Other work has offered conjectures about how Wikipedians differ from other editors and how Wikipe...
With the advent of digital video recorders and video-on-demand services, the way in which we consume media is undergoing a fundamental change. People today are less likely to watch shows at the same time, let alone the same place. As a result, television viewing which was once a social activity has been reduced to a passive, isolated experience. Co...
With the advent of digital video recorders and video-on-demand services, the way in which we consume media is undergoing a fundamental change. People today are less likely to watch shows at the same time, let alone the same place. As a result, television viewing which was once a social activity has been reduced to a passive, isolated experience. Co...
