iSchool Hosts Workshop for NSF-Funded Social Computing Researchers

Faculty members at the School of Information Studies (iSchool) recently hosted a one-day workshop for New York researchers doing National Science Foundation-funded work in the area of social-computational systems.

Nancy McCracken and
Carsten Osterlund

Research Associate Professor Nancy McCracken and Associate Professor Carsten Oesterlund organized the event, in conjunction with participating faculty members Kevin Crowston, Distinguished Professor of Information Science; Jun Wang, research assistant professor; and Steven Sawyer, associate dean for research.

Goals for the workshop, according to Professor McCracken, were “to enable new and established networks among research groups, give everyone the opportunity to provide an informal venue to learn about others’ research and provide graduate students exposure to related work.”

Invited were principal investigators, co-principal investigators and graduate students involved in 13 varied research projects. Participants were from Cornell University; New York University; Polytechnic University of New York; SUNY at Stony Brook; Rochester Institute of Technology; University of Rochester; and Syracuse University.

The projects, and their research teams, included:

• Socially Intelligent Computing to Support Citizen Science (Jun Wang, Syracuse University);
• Collaborative Research, Focusing Attention to Improve the Performance of Citizen Science Systems: Beautiful Images and Perceptive Observers (Carsten Oesterlund, Syracuse University)
• Computer Learning of Dynamical Systems to Investigate Cognitive and Motivational Effects of Social Media Use on Political Participation (John Jost, Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler and Joshua Tucker, New York University)
• Computational Facilitation of Online Deliberation in Complex Policymaking (Cynthia Farina, Daniel Cosley and Claire Cardie, Cornell University)
• Socially Intelligent Computing for Coding of Qualitative Data (Nancy McCracken, Syracuse University)
• Collaborative Research: Social Diffusion in Online Media for Reaching Hidden Communities and Underrepresented Groups (Chris Homan, Rochester Institute of Technology, and Vince Silenzio, University of Rochester)
• Collaborative Research: A Human Computational Approach for Improving Data Quality in Citizen Science Projects (Steven Kelling, Carl Lagoze and Carla Gomes, Cornell University)
• Collaborative Research: Open Innovation Intermediaries: Brokering Technology and Wisdoms of the Crowds (Anne-Laure Fayard, Polytechnic University of New York and Natalia Levina, New York University)
• Collaborative Research: Leveraging Others’ Insights to Improve Collaborative Analysis (Sue Fussell and Claire Cardie, Cornell University)
• Collaborative Research: Improving Online Deliberation with Computational Supports for Frame Reflection (Geri Gay, Cornell University)
• Using Gaze Cues to Build Partner Models for Collaborative Behavior (Gregory Zelinski, Susan Brennan and Dimitrios Samaras, SUNY at Stony Brook)
• Documents and the Doing of Science: Studying Cyberinfrastructures in Use (Steve Sawyer and Carsten Oesterlund, Syracuse University)
•  Exploring Volumetric Modeling and Design Theory for Virtual Environments (Hong Qin, SUNY at Stony Brook)