Scott Counts
About Me
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.
Research
I 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.
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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:
- Enterprise: Corporations are natural places for social software to help employees communicate and collaborate
more effectively. With the Creative Systems group, we explored social network and feed integration in Outlook in a project called Salsa.
Papers: ICWSM09 - Personal: The "social cognition of social networking":
How do online representations meet desired self-representations and how are people perceived by others as a function of their online representations. We show that impressions
of others are formed very rapidly (even below conscious awareness) and that these impressions require very little information. Impressions formation is linked to specific profile attributes.
Papers: ICWSM09, ICWSM08b, ICWSM08a, HICSS08 - Mobile: What happens when social networking is out in the world when people are actually being social?
Through a variety of prototypes and studies, this question is explored, touching on group-based mobile messaging, physically worn
sensors for activity tracking, asynchronous mobile gaming, novel UI for mobile media, and theoretical underpinnings.
Papers: HICSS08, GIS07, CSCW Journal 07, CSCW06, CHIEA05, CHI04
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.
- Citizen Science: Citizen science refers to the process of engaging interested non-professional scientists in the scientific process.
There is a tremendous opportunity to leverage the efforts of thousands, even millions, of people around the planet to advance science (see the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Galaxy Zoo). In our work, we built a prototype system for helping people discuss and build pseudo-scientific documents around live data streams collected from the web.
Papers: CHI09 - Markets: Economic markets facilitate efficiency by helping systems reach equilibrium when all parties maximize personal utility. Could this principle be applied to the production and consumption of digital goods in highly distributed collaboration systems? Gary Hsieh and
I showed that a market in a question and answer system makes it more efficent and raises content quality, but reduces sense of community.
Papers: CHI09 - Enterprise Knowledge: Knowledge repositories serve a number of functions in corporations. We examined a year of usage of such a repository at Microsoft to better understand how bottom-up social technologies mesh
with top-down corporate structure. This work is currently under academic review. Email me for more.
- Tools: What can we build to augment existing productivity (and other, e.g., creativity) software to help leverage the efforts of others? This is an active area of development, and we hope to release a first research prototype by end of summer 2009. Email me for more.
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.
- Information Diffusion: How are new forms of social media like micro-blogging impacting the "capacity" of people to spread information? This work is in progress. Email me for more.
- Neuropsychology: Successful media reaches people at automatic cognitive process levels (millisecond level processing that people may not even be aware of). To understand how social media compares to traditional forms of media with respect to automatic processing, we are conducting a study of neurophysiological responses to social and other forms of media. Email me for more.
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
| Publicity Chair for CSCW 2010 |
| Associate Chair for CHI 2009; Communities and Technologies 2009; WWW 2009; CSCW 2008; |
| Conference reviewing for CHI 2007; CHI 2006; CHI 2005; CHI 2004; |
| Journal Reviewing: HCI Journal; IJHCS |
Miscellaneous Links of Interest
- Research Directions for Social Computing workshop at GROUP 2007 - Co-organized with Cliff Lampe from Michigan State
- Mobile Social Software Workshop at CHI 2006 - Co-organized with Henri ter Hofte from Telematica Institute and Ian Smith from Intel Research.
- SLAM - Working prototype social software for Windows Smartphones, Slam supports flexible group formation and group-based communication for coordination, messaging, and photo sharing. Slam is also backward compatible with SMS.
- Handbook of Collective Intelligence Wiki
- My Twitter page