Augmented Social Cogniton: Using Social Web technology to enhance the ability of groups to remember, think, and reason

We are experiencing a new Social Web, where people share, communicate, commiserate, and conflict with each other. As evidenced by systems like Wikipedia, twitter, and del.icio.us, these environments are turning people into social information foragers and sharers. Groups interact to resolve conflicts and jointly make sense of topic areas from “Obama vs. Clinton” to “Islam.”

PARC’s Augmented Social Cognition researchers – who come from cognitive psychology, computer science, HCI, CSCW, and other disciplines – focus on understanding how to “enhance a group of people’s ability to remember, think, and reason”. Through Social Web systems like social bookmarking sites, blogs, Wikis, and more, we can finally study, in detail, these types of enhancements on a very large scale.

In this talk, we summarize recent work and early findings on: (1) how conflict and coordination have played out in Wikipedia, and how social transparency might affect reader trust; (2) how decreasing interaction costs might change participation in social tagging systems; and (3) how computation can help organize user-generated content and metadata.

Speaker Details

Ed H. Chi is area manager and senior research scientist at Palo Alto Research Center’s Augmented Social Cognition Group. He leads the group in understanding how Web2.0 and Social Computing systems help groups of people to remember, think and reason. Ed completed his three degrees (B.S., M.S., and Ph.D.) in 6.5 years from University of Minnesota, and has been doing research on user interface software systems since 1993. He has been featured and quoted in the press, such as the Economist, Time Magazine, LA Times, and the Associated Press.With 19 patents and over 50 research articles, his most well-known past project is the study of Information Scent — understanding how users navigate and understand the Web and information environments. He has also worked on computational molecular biology, ubicomp, and recommendation/search engines. He has won awards for both teaching and research. In his spare time, Ed is an avid Taekwondo martial artist, photographer, and snowboarder.

Date:
Speakers:
Ed Chi
Affiliation:
Palo Alto Research Center

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