Paul Resnick's research while affiliated with University of Michigan and other places
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Publications (138)
As content moderation becomes a central aspect of all social media platforms and online communities, interest has grown in how to make moderation decisions contestable. On social media platforms where individual communities moderate their own activities, the responsibility to address user appeals falls on volunteers from within the community. While...
To reduce the spread of misinformation, social media platforms may take enforcement actions against offending content, such as adding informational warning labels, reducing distribution, or removing content entirely. However, both their actions and their inactions have been controversial and plagued by allegations of partisan bias. The controversy...
While cross-partisan conversations are central to a vibrant deliberative democracy, these conversations are hard to have, especially amidst unprecedented levels of partisan animosity we observe today. We report on a qualitative study of 17 US residents who engage with outpartisans on Reddit to understand what they look for in these interactions, an...
Can crowd workers be trusted to judge whether news-like articles circulating on the Internet are wildly misleading, or does partisanship and inexperience get in the way? We assembled pools of both liberal and conservative crowd raters and tested three ways of asking them to make judgments about 374 articles. In a no research condition, they were ju...
While cross-partisan conversations are central to a vibrant democracy, these are hard conversations to have, especially in the United States amidst unprecedented levels of partisan animosity. Such interactions often devolve into name-calling and personal attacks. We report on a qualitative study of 17 US residents who have engaged with outpartisans...
Existing tools for exploratory analysis of information diffusion in social media focus on the message senders who actively diffuse the meme. We develop a tool for audience analysis, focusing on the people who are passively exposed to the messages, with a special emphasis on competing memes such as propagations and corrections of a rumor. In such co...
Social news aggregator services generate readers’ subjective reactions to news opinion articles. Can we use those as a resource to classify articles as liberal or conservative, even without knowing the self-identified political leaning of most users? We applied three semi-supervised learning methods that propagate classifications of political news...
In many classification tasks, the ground truth is either noisy or subjective. Examples include: which of two alternative paper titles is better? is this comment toxic? what is the political leaning of this news article? We refer to such tasks as survey settings because the ground truth is defined through a survey of one or more human raters. In sur...
Research on online political communication has primarily focused on content in explicitly political spaces. In this work, we set out to determine the amount of political talk missed using this approach. Focusing on Reddit, we estimate that nearly half of all political talk takes place in subreddits that host political content less than 25% of the t...
We present the first large-scale measurement study of cross-partisan discussions between liberals and conservatives on YouTube, based on a dataset of 274,241 political videos from 973 channels of US partisan media and 134M comments from 9.3M users over eight months in 2020. Contrary to a simple narrative of echo chambers, we find a surprising amoun...
Research on online political communication has primarily focused on content in explicitly political spaces. In this work, we set out to determine the amount of political talk missed using this approach. Focusing on Reddit, we estimate that nearly half of all political talk takes place in subreddits that host political content less than 25% of the t...
We present the first large-scale measurement study of cross-partisan discussions between liberals and conservatives on YouTube, based on a dataset of 274,241 political videos from 973 channels of US partisan media and 134M comments from 9.3M users over eight months in 2020. Contrary to a simple narrative of echo chambers, we find a surprising amoun...
We present the first large-scale measurement study of cross-partisan discussions between liberals and conservatives on YouTube, based on a dataset of 274,241 political videos from 973 channels of US partisan media and 134M comments from 9.3M users over eight months in 2020. Contrary to a simple narrative of echo chambers, we find a surprising amoun...
Hundreds of thousands of students drop out of school each year in the United States, despite billions of dollars of funding and myriad educational reforms. Existing research tends to look at the effect of easily measurable student characteristics. However, a vast number of harder-to-measure student traits, skills, and resources affect educational s...
Online communities about similar topics may maintain very different norms of interaction. Past research identifies many processes that contribute to maintaining stable norms, including self-selection, pre-entry learning, post-entry learning, and retention. We analyzed political subreddits that had distinctive, stable levels of toxic comments on Red...
We present an experimental assessment of the impact of feature attribution-style explanations on human performance in predicting the consensus toxicity of social media posts with advice from an unreliable machine learning model. By doing so we add to a small but growing body of literature inspecting the utility of interpretable machine learning in...
Generating multiple-choice questions is known to improve students' critical thinking and deep learning. Visualizing relationships between concepts enhances meaningful learning, students' ability to relate new concepts to previously learned concepts. We designed and deployed a collaborative learning process through which students generate multiple-c...
Retrieval practice, spacing, and interleaving are known to enhance long-term learning and transfer, but reduce short-term performance. It can be difficult to get both students and instructors to use these techniques since they perceive them as impeding initial student learning. We leveraged user experience design and research techniques, including...
E-commerce sites have an incentive to encourage impulse buying, even when not in the consumer's best interest. This study investigates what features e-commerce sites use to encourage impulse buying and what tools consumers desire to curb their online spending. We present two studies: (1) a systematic content analysis of 200 top e-commerce websites...
Bayesian statistical analysis has gained attention in recent years, including in HCI. The Bayesian approach has several advantages over traditional statistics, including producing results with more intuitive interpretations. Despite growing interest, few papers in CHI use Bayesian analysis. Existing tools to learn Bayesian statistics require signif...
In an introductory Python programming course intended for non-majors with little prior CS experience, with 85 male and 108 female students, we were able to capture electronic traces of students' studying and problem-solving. There was no significant difference in final exam scores by gender but we found that female students spent 12.1 more hours st...
Popularity systems, like Twitter retweets, Reddit upvotes, and Pinterest pins have the potential to guide people toward posts that others liked. That, however, creates a feedback loop that reduces their informativeness: items marked as more popular get more attention, so that additional upvotes and retweets may simply reflect the increased attentio...
Effective communication is crucial for instructors and students in programming courses. However, communicating about code can be difficult --- particularly in asynchronous settings where an instructor authors an explanation meant to be read and understood by a student later on. Communicating about code is uniquely difficult for two reasons. First,...
Popularity systems, like Twitter retweets, Reddit upvotes, and Pinterest pins have the potential to guide people toward posts that others liked. That, however, creates a feedback loop that reduces their informativeness: items marked as more popular get more attention, so that additional upvotes and retweets may simply reflect the increased attentio...
We introduce an adversarial method for producing high-recall explanations of neural text classifier decisions. Building on an existing architecture for extractive explanations via hard attention, we add an adversarial layer which scans the residual of the attention for remaining predictive signal. Motivated by the important domain of detecting pers...
The Guardian ---the fifth most widely read online newspaper in the world as of 2014---changed conversations on its commenting platform by altering its design from non-threaded to single-level threaded in 2012. We studied this naturally occurring experiment to investigate the impact of conversation threading on user retention as mediated by several...
E-commerce designers must decide how many products to display at one time. Choice overload research has demonstrated the surprising finding that more choice is not necessarily better?selecting from larger choice sets can be more cognitively demanding and can result in lower levels of choice satisfaction. This research tests the choice overload effe...
Consumers are turning to Facebook Groups to buy and sell with strangers in their local communities. This trend is counter-intuitive given Facebook's lack of conventional e-commerce features, such as sophisticated search engines and reputation systems. We interviewed 18 members of two Mom-to-Mom Facebook sale groups. Despite a lack of commerce tools...
Runestone is an open-source ebook platform designed to create and publish interactive computer science textbooks (See http://runestoneinteractive.org/). Runestone textbooks support programming within the browser, code visualizations, and a wide variety of practice activities, from multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank questions to Parsons Problems...
Recommender systems have become a natural part of the user experience in today's online world. These systems are able to deliver value both for users and providers and are one prominent example where the output of academic research has a direct impact on the advancements in industry. In this article, we have briefy reviewed the history of this mult...
Existing retrieval systems rely on a single active query to pull documents from the index. Relevance feedback may be used to iteratively refine the query, but only one query is active at a time. If the user's information need has multiple aspects, the query must represent the union of these aspects. We consider a new paradigm of retrieval where mul...
Undergraduates interviewed about privacy concerns related to online data collection made apparently contradictory statements. The same issue could evoke concern or not in the span of an interview, sometimes even a single sentence. Drawing on dual-process theories from psychology, we argue that some of the apparent contradictions can be resolved if...
Many visual depictions of probability distributions, such as error bars, are difficult for users to accurately interpret. We present and study an alternative representation, Hypothetical Outcome Plots (HOPs), that animates a finite set of individual draws. In contrast to the statistical background required to interpret many static representations o...
Many previous techniques identify trending topics in social media, even topics that are not pre-defined. We present a technique to identify trending rumors, which we define as topics that include disputed factual claims. Putting aside any attempt to assess whether the rumors are true or false, it is valuable to identify trending rumors as early as...
Walking and other forms of physical activity have many health benefits, but people often fail to follow through on their own goals of being more active. To address gaps in current understanding of how to design technology- supported physical activity interventions, we conducted a randomized field experiment of a commitment device: making public ann...
Most electronic behavior traces available to social scientists offer a site-centric view of behavior. We argue that to understand patterns of interpersonal communication and media consumption, a more person-centric view is needed. The ideal research platform would capture reading as well as writing and friending, behavior across multiple sites, and...
We consider a scenario where a searcher requires both high precision and high recall from an interactive retrieval process. Such scenarios are very common in real life, exemplified by medical search, legal search, market research, and literature review. When access to the entire data set is available, an active learning loop could be used to ask fo...
List of sponsors of the Eighth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.
List of conference committee members of the Eighth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.
Descriptions of the tutorials presented at the Eighth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
In response to rising health care costs associated with obesity rates, some health care insurers are adopting incentivized technology-enhanced wellness programs. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the large-scale implementation of an incentivized Internet-mediated walking program for obese adults and to examine program acceptance, adherence,...
The Internet gives individuals more choice in political news and information sources and more tools to filter out disagreeable information. Citing the preference described by selective exposure theory — people prefer information that supports their beliefs and avoid counter-attitudinal information — observers warn that people may use these tools to...
A recent study found that presenting news suggestions as clusters in a sidebar can lead to more exploration of articles and clusters related to particular stories [1]. We conducted a lab study to test the robustness of the result.Our results only partially replicate the original findings: people read more articles, but not from significantly more c...
The replication of, or perhaps the replicability of, research is often considered to be a cornerstone of scientific progress. Yet unlike many other disciplines, like medicine, physics, or mathematics, we have almost no drive and barely any reason to consider replicating the work of other HCI researchers. Our community is driven to publish novel res...
Broadcast media are declining in their power to decide which issues and viewpoints will reach large audiences. But new information filters are appearing, in the guise of recommender systems, aggregators, search engines, feed ranking algorithms, and the sites we bookmark and the people and organizations we choose to follow on Twitter. Sometimes we e...
Individuals, groups, and societies all experience conflict, and attempt to resolve it in numerous ways. The Oxford Handbook of Economic Conflict Resolution brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to offer perspectives on the current state and future challenges in negotiation and conflict resolution. It aims to act as an aid in identifyin...
The CubeThat browser extension for Chrome displays recommended additional news stories related to the same topic as the current news story. The recommended stories are organized into clusters, and clusters that the user has already sampled from are grayed out, in order to encourage users to explore multiple aspects of a story. Users can also provid...
According to an old English saying, “one bad apple spoils the whole barrel. ” In online communities there’s some truth to this notion. A stalker, thief, troll, or impersonator can ruin the community experience for the majority of members who respect the intent of the site and the feelings of others. Misbehavior need not be illegal to be destructive...
Summary Online communities depend upon a core of comm itted members who participate, contribute, and stick with the group. To encourage commitment, community design has to accommodate people's motivations for being in the community and unleash the social forces that cause people to feel attached to the community, to feel responsibility for the comm...
Must the Internet promote political fragmentation? Although this is a possible outcome of personalized online news, we argue that other futures are possible and that thoughtful design could promote more socially desirable behavior. Research has shown that individuals crave opinion reinforcement more than they avoid exposure to diverse viewpoints an...
We characterize a family of proposal-refusal school choice mechanisms, including the Boston, Shang-hai, and Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanisms as special cases. We find that moving from one extreme member to the other results in systematic changes in both the incentive properties and nested Nash equi-libria. In the laboratory, we find that partici...
Two public display systems, with different methods of posting, were deployed over several years. One, the Thank You Board, was designed to give people an outlet specifically for publicly thanking and acknowledging others in the community. The other, SI Display, showed any Twitter post directed to the display and did not have explicit usage guidelin...
To understand why and how people share health information online, we interviewed fourteen people with significant health concerns who participate in both online health communities and Facebook. Qualitative analysis of these interviews highlighted the ways that people think about with whom and how to share different types of information as they purs...
Though political theorists have emphasized the importance of political discussion in non-political spaces, past study of online political discussion has focused on primarily political websites. Using a random sample from Blogger.com, we find that 25 % of all political posts are from blogs that post about politics less than 20 % of the time, because...
To be successful, online communities need the people who participate in them to contribute the resources on which the group’s existence is built. The types of resource contributions needed differ widely across different types of groups. Volunteers in NASA’s clickworker community
Approximately half of American adults do not meet recommended physical activity guidelines. Face-to-face lifestyle interventions improve health outcomes but are unlikely to yield population-level improvements because they can be difficult to disseminate, expensive to maintain, and inconvenient for the recipient. In contrast, Internet-based behavior...
Starting a new online community with a limited number of members who have not self-selected for participation in the community is challenging. The space must appear active to lure visitors to return; when the pool of participants is small, a large fraction must be converted from lurkers to contributors, and contributors must receive responses quick...
Background: Automated, Internet-mediated behavior-change interventions can be disseminated widely and at a low per-person cost. They also allow users to receive support at a time and place that is convenient for them. However, some of these programs suffer from high rates of attrition. Online communities that allow participants to communicate with...
An ambitious TMSP education program which recognizes that learners fall into multiple categories, will facilitate training people to participate in the complex interplay between social participation and technical systems.
Many online systems for bilateral transactions elicit performance feedback from both transacting partners. Such bilateral feedback giving introduces strategic considerations. We focus on reciprocity in the giving of feedback: how prevalent a strategy of giving feedback is only if feedback is first received from one’s trading partner. The overall le...
Contests and challenges have energized researchers and focused attention in many fields recently, including recommender systems. At the 2008 RecSys conference, winners were announced for a contest proposing new startup companies. The 2009 conference featured a panel reflecting on the then recently completed Netflix challenge. Would additional conte...
What are the benefits and drawbacks of integrating health and wellness interventions into existing online social network websites? In this paper, we report on a case study of deploying the Three Good Things positive psychology exercise as a Facebook application. Our experience shows that embedding a wellness intervention in an existing social websi...
Is a polarized society inevitable, where people choose to be exposed to only political news and commentary that reinforces their existing viewpoints? We examine the relationship between the numbers of supporting and challenging items in a collection of political opinion items and readers' satisfaction, and then evaluate whether simple presentation...
Conversation double pivots recommend target items related to a source item, based on co-mentions of source and target items in online forums. We deployed several variants on the drupal.org site that supports the Drupal open source community, and assessed them through clickthrough rates. A similarity metric based on correlation of mentions rather th...
Engaging in regular physical activity can be challenging, particularly during the winter months. To promote physical activity at the University of Michigan during the winter months, an eight-week Internet-mediated program (Active U) was developed providing participants with an online physical activity log, goal setting, motivational emails, and opt...
We study protocols to enable one user (the principal) to make potentially profitable but risky interactions with an- other user (the agent), in the absence of direct trust be- tween the two parties. In such situations, it is possible to enable the interaction indirectly through a chain of credit or "trust" links. We introduce a model that provides...
News aggregators rely on links and users votes to select and present subsets of the large quantity of news and opinion items generated each day. Opinion diversity in the output sets can provide several benefits. We outline a range of diversity goals and discuss user reactions to a pilot implementation that selects for diversity as well as popularit...
Aggregators rely on votes, and links to select and present subsets of the large quantity of news and opinion items generated each day. Opinion and topic diversity in the output sets can provide individual and societal benefits, but simply selecting the most popular items may not yield as much diversity as is present in the overall pool of votes and...
Aggregators rely on votes, and links to select and present subsets of the large quantity of news and opinion items gen- erated each day. Opinion and topic diversity in the output sets can provide individual and societal benefits, but simply selecting the most popular items may not yield as much di- versity as is present in the overall pool of votes...
Virtual communities, like all communities, require ongoing community maintenance activities. This paper presents an empirical study examining how a wiki repository was used to help overcome some of the community maintenance challenges common to help-based email list discussions. Specifically, we found that inclusion of off-topic but related content...
In this letter, we outline a new approach to modeling, analyzing, and combating manipulative attacks on recommender systems.
Internet-mediated interventions aimed at increasing physical activity are becoming increasingly popular; however, little is known about their effectiveness. Active U is an eight-week automated Internet-mediated physical activity intervention that incorporates physical activity tracking, team competition, motivational emails, and goal setting to pro...
Attackers may seek to manipulate recommender systems in order to promote or suppress certain items. Existing de- fenses based on analysis of ratings also discard useful in- formation from honest raters. In this paper, we show that this is unavoidable and provide a lower bound on how much information must be discarded. We use an information- theoret...
Interface Controls Reduction is the design task of generating simplified interface controls for setting a larger, more complex set of controls. We explore three different empirical approaches to the task: preset sharing, point clustering, and principal component analysis. All three draw on the experience of lead users to recommend simplified contro...
This poster will present a research plan for characterizing online political discussion that happens on non-political blogs, an area that has often been overlooked literature about online political discourse. We will present some preliminary results regarding the percentage of blogs that are political and research design for evaluating discourse qu...
Many sites on the web offer collaborative databases that catalog items such as bands, events, products, or software modules. Conversation pivots allow readers to navigate from pages about these items to conversations about them on the same site or elsewhere on the Internet. Double pivots allow readers to navigate from item pages to pages about othe...
An attacker can draw attention to items that don't deserve that attention by manipulating recommender systems. We describe an influence-limiting algorithm that can turn exist- ing recommender systems into manipulation-resistant sys- tems. Honest reporting is the optimal strategy for raters who wish to maximize their influence. If an attacker can cr...
This chapter is an overview of the design and analysis of reputation systems for strategic users. We consider three specific strategic threats to reputa- tion systems: the possibility of users with poor reputations starting afresh (whitewashing); lack of effort or honesty in providing feedback; and sybil attacks, in which users create phantom feedb...
Appendix containing proofs omitted from
Resnick and Sami,"The Influence Limiter: Provably Manipulation-Resistant Recommender Systems", ACM Recommender Systems Conference 2007.
Large-scale online communities need to manage the tension between critical mass and information overload. Slashdot is a news and discussion site that has used comment rating to allow massive participation while providing a mechanism for users to filter content. By default, comments with low ratings are hidden. Of users who changed the defaults, mor...
One of the important challenges faced by designers of online communities is eliciting sufficent contributions from community members. Users in online communities may have difficulty either in finding opportunities to add value, or in understanding the value of their contributions to the community. Various social science theories suggest that sho- w...
Many recommendation and decision processes depend on eliciting evaluations of opportunities, products, and vendors. A scoring
system is devised that induces honest reporting of feedback. Each rater merely reports a signal, and the system applies proper
scoring rules to the implied posterior beliefs about another rater’s report. Honest reporting pro...
Under-contribution is a problem for many online communities. Social psychology theories of social loafing and goal-setting can provide mid-level design principles to address this problem. We tested the design principles in two field experiments. In one, members of an online movie recommender community were reminded of the uniqueness of their contri...
