Scott Counts | ![]() |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
About Me |
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I am a Researcher in the VIBE Group and also a member of the Social Computing Group at Microsoft Research, working in the area of social computing. My research focuses on building and researching social software based
on psychological principles in order to facilitate online social interactions, networks, and distributed collaboration.
I received my Ph.D. in Social and Personality Psychology from the University of Washington in 2002. There I studied personality and the unique and stable patterns of emotion and behavior each person shows in response to social situations. In my spare time I enjoy outdoor sports, particularly skiing and cycling.
ResearchI break out my social computing research into three non-mutually exclusive sub-areas: social networking, social cognition, and social media, and am working actively in all three areas. Click any of the boxes to learn more about past and current efforts. If you just want publications, jump to the list of selected publications below.
Digitally mediated social networks connect people and facilitate communication and sharing. For a compendium of foundational work in the area, see this special issue of JCMC on Social Network Sites. In my work, I have focused on the following three areas:
Social cognition here refers to massively distributed (in both time and space) collaboration systems. This includes collective intelligence systems, wikis, and any other form of distributed, collective effort on the part of a large number of individuals. High level goals include eliminating redundancy in effort (globally), maximizing the reach of distributed collaboration, and building tools that raise the contribution quality of collaborators. I have focused on topic domains like citizen science and enterprise wikis, but also conceptual areas like how to improve efficiency in such systems through markets.
I consider social media an umbrella term for many forms of computer-mediated communication, with a focus on large scale systems like blogs and micro-blogs.
Selected Publications Hsieh, G. & Counts, S. (2009) mimir: A Market_Based Real-Time Question and Answer Service. CHI '09. Luther, K, Counts, S., Stecher, K., Hoff, A., & Johns, P. (2009) Pathfinder: An Online Collaboration Environment for Citizen Scientists. CHI '09. Counts, S., & Stecher, K. (2009) Self-Presentation of Personality During Online Profile Creation. ICWSM '09. Stecher, K. & Counts, S. (2009) Salsa: Leveraging Email to Create a Social Network for the Enterprise. ICWSM '09. Stecher, K. & Counts, S. (2008) Spontaneous Inference of Personality Traits and Effects on Memory for Online Profiles. ICWSM '08. Stecher, K. & Counts, S. (2008) Thin Slices of Online Profile Attributes. ICWSM '08. Counts, S., & Fisher, K. (2008) Mobile Social Networking as Information Ground. HICSS '08. Counts, S., & Smith, M. (2007) Where Were We: Communities for Sharing Space-Time Trails. ACM GIS '07. Counts, S. (2007) Group-Based Mobile Messaging in Support of the Social Side of Leisure. CSCW Journal. Riegelsberger, J., Counts, S., Farnham, S., & Philips, B. (2007). Personality Matters: Incorporating Detailed User Attributes and Preferences into the Matchmaking Process.HICCS '07. Riegelsberger, J., Counts, S., Farnham, S., & Philips, B. (2006). Sounds Good to Me: Effects of Photo and Voice Profiles on Gamer Partner Choice. CSCW '06. Best Note Award Fono, D., & Counts, S. (2006). Sandboxes: Supporting Social Play through Collaborative Multimedia Composition on Mobile Phones. CSCW '06. Grudin, J., Tallarico, S, and Counts, S. (2005). As Technophobia Disappears: Implications for Design. Group05 Short Paper. Counts, S.J., & Geraci, J. (2005). Incorporating Physical Co-presence at Events into Digital Social Networking. CHI05 Extended Abstracts. Counts, S.J., & Fellheimer, E. (2004). Supporting Social Presence through Lightweight Photo Sharing On and Off the Desktop. Proceedings of CHI '04, (Vienna, Austria, April 27-29, 2004), ACM Press. LeeTiernan, S.J., Farnham, S.D., Cheng, L. (2003). Two Methods for Auto-Organizing Personal Web History , In Proceedings of CHI '03, (Ft. Lauderdale, FL, April 7 - 10, 2003), ACM Press. LeeTiernan, S.J. & Grudin, J. (2003). Supporting Engagement in Asynchronous Education , CHI2003 Extended Abstracts. Fiore, A., LeeTiernan, S., & Smith, M. (2002). Observed Behavior and Perceived Value of Authors in Usenet Newsgroups: Bridging the Gap , In Proceedings of CHI '02, (Minneapolis, MN, April 20-25, 2002), ACM Press. LeeTiernan, S.J., & Grudin, J. Fostering Engagement in Asynchronous Learning through Collaborative Multimedia Annotation , In Proceedings of Eighth IFIP TC.13 Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Tokyo, Japan, July 9-13, 2001 (Interact 2001). LeeTiernan, S.J., Cutrell, E., Czerwinski, M.P., & Hoffman, H. Effective Notification Systems Depend On User Trust , In Proceedings of Eighth IFIP TC. 13 Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Tokyo, Japan, July 9-13, 2001 (Interact 2001).
Recent Professional Activities
Miscellaneous Links of Interest
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||