Social Computing

Kulkarni Shares Talkabout Research on CNBC

In a recent article on CNBC, Assistant Professor Chinmay Kulkarni shared his research that is bringing together individuals with very different viewpoints. Kulkarni's research focuses on building technology that can support and improve how people live and learn. So he was quick to spot an opportunity following the election to connect groups of people with differing opinions for a positive gain.

"It is easy to say, 'I'm going to talk to somebody else and try to understand them,' but without the right circumstances, you're quickly at each other's throat," Kulkarni said.

Friends Help Friends Feel Better on Facebook

Personal interactions on Facebook can have a major impact on a person's feelings of well-being and satisfaction with life just as much as getting married or having a baby, a new study by Carnegie Mellon University and Facebook researchers shows.

But not just any interaction has these positive effects. Passively reading posts or one-click feedback such as "likes" don't move the needle. What really makes people feel good is when those they know and care about write personalized posts or comments.

Kraut Receives NSF Grant in Support of Online Communities

Despite the existence of successful online groups, the majority of newly created ones fail. They don’t survive, fail to attract enough digital users, or don’t meet goals their founders set for them. Herbert A. Simon Professor of Human-Computer Interaction Robert Kraut has dedicated much of his recent research to investigating why some groups succeed where others fail.

Digital Footprints

Personal information management and privacy is a major and increasing challenge. New internet architectures will make people and their interactions more transparent to others than ever, and increase our digital footprints online. In a set of projects, we are studying user perspectives on anonymity and privacy online.

Technology-Enabled Role-Playing in Design

College professors frequently use role-playing in class as a way to engage their students and enhance the learning experience. However, role-playing often creates an unbalanced classroom, where the majority of students are observing and only a few actors are “engaged.” This project investigates using technology to engage all students during classroom role-play. In particular, we want to explore social media platforms such as Twitter, which have been shown to enhance classroom engagement.

Supporting Newcomer Socialization in Online Production Communities

Online production communities are becoming increasingly important, because they are creating the software that drives the Internet, generating valuable scientific data and building history’s largest encyclopedia. In the face of inevitable turnover, every online community must incorporate successive generations of newcomers to survive. Newcomers are a source of content, labor, new ideas, and an audience.

Social Ideation Systems

This project investigates how social computing systems can optimize real-time creative collaboration, whether in teams or with crowds. We are actively developing a web-based social computing system for brainstorming that facilitates managing the interactions of brainstormers with each other so that the solution space is explored with the right combination of breadth and depth.

Social Cybersecurity

Our research into the human factors of cybersecurity focuses on people as social actors whose security behaviors are influenced by their relationships, communities and life situations.

PrivacyGrade

Many people are surprised to learn how much data smartphone apps are collecting about them. PrivacyGrade is a website we are creating that presents the results of our privacy analysis of several hundred thousand Android apps. We combine static analysis techniques with crowdsourcing to understand people's concerns over certain behaviors, such as using location data for advertising, or using contact lists for social networking.

Internet Support Groups

People facing serious health threats increasingly use the Internet to obtain information and support. Internet support groups (ISGs), online communities where people come together to exchange information and/or support, are an important resource for patients grappling with serious medical conditions. Participation in health-related ISGs has been associated with significant reductions in participant-reported depression, anxiety and other indicators of psychological distress.

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