Dan Cosley (aka DanCo PhD)

Dan Cosley glamour shot
Contact info:
Dan Cosley
37 Janivar Dr
Ithaca NY 14850

drc44@cornell.edu
612-327-6310
Affiliations:
Cornell HCI Group

GroupLens research lab

CommunityLab
Quick job search-related info:
My CV, research, and teaching statements (pdf).

Overview

Welcome to Dan Cosley's academic job search web site. My 2006-2008 gig is as a visiting assistant professor working with HCI group and teaching a couple of HCI classes. It's good. After that, the future is less clear, so I will seek jobs again this year. I have my PhD from Minnesota; John Riedl and Loren Terveen are my advisors, and the thesis is Helping Hands: Design for Member-Maintained Online Communities. It's a pretty good read.

For those who want to do background checks, find out about my research, etc., my CV, research, and teaching statements (pdf) are available. Below I try to hit the highlights.

Research summary

New 1/20/08: A paper and a panel at ICA 08, both around Wikis and politics/policy. I'm a minor player in both of those efforts, but still, it's nice that I was able to bring the Wikipedia virus to Cornell and help other people run with it in their areas of specialty.

New 1/11/08: Publications at CHI 08 and AAAI's Spring Symposium. Both were super experiences working with undergrads to produce nice research; on the CHI I was first and the AAAI I was last, and I liked both roles.

My overall goal is to help groups make sense of information. This leads me to research in online communities, HCI, CSCW, and recommender systems. I also have done work touching on AI, information retrieval, and computer science education. I'm a builder and experimenter, using theory from social psychology and economics to predict how system designs might affect people's behavior, then building the systems and testing how they affect actual human beings.

In my current work I study how to motivate members of online communities such as MovieLens and Wikipedia to provide more and higher-quality contributions to the community. Given the recent debate about the value of Wikipedia and the growth (and death) of online communities, I claim this is pretty interesting.

Along the way, I have:

For more information, read my research statement.

Recent and Favorite Publications

  1. Cosley, D., Lewenstein, J., Herman, A., Holloway, J., Baxter, J., Nomura, S., Boehner, K., and Gay, G. (2008). ArtLinks: Fostering Social Awareness and Reflection in Museums. CHI 2008, Florence, Italy, to appear. (22% acceptance rate) [email for preprint]
  2. Nobarany, S., Haraty, M., and Cosley, D. (2008). GePuTTIS: General Purpose Transitive Trust Inference System for Social Networks. AAAI 2008 Social Information Processing Spring Symposium, Palo Alto, CA, to appear. [email for preprint]
  3. Cosley, D., Frankowski, D., Terveen, L., and Riedl, J. (2007). SuggestBot: using intelligent task routing to help people find work in wikipedia. IUI 2007, Honolulu, HI, pp. 32-41. (22% acceptance rate) [PDF] [PS] [ACM DL]
  4. Sen, S., Lam, S.K., Rashid, A., Cosley, D., Frankowski, D., Osterhouse, J., Harper, F.M., and Riedl, J. (2006). tagging, communities, vocabulary, evolution. CSCW 2006, Banff, AB, Canada, pp. 181-190. (22% acceptance rate, best paper award) [PDF] [PS] [ACM DL]
  5. Frankowski, D., Cosley, D., Sen, S., Terveen, L., and Riedl, J. (2006). You are what you say: Privacy risks of public mentions. SIGIR 2006, Seattle, WA, pp. 565-572. (19% acceptance rate) [PDF] [PS] [ACM DL].
  6. Cosley, D., Frankowski, D., Terveen, L., and Riedl, J. (2006). Using Intelligent Task Routing and Contribution Review to Help Communities Build Artifacts of Lasting Value. CHI 2006, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, pp. 1037-1046. (24% acceptance rate) [PDF] [PS] [ACM DL]
  7. Cosley, D., Frankowski, D., Kiesler, S., Terveen, L., and Riedl, J. (2005). How Oversight Improves Member-Maintained Communities. CHI 2005, Portland, OR, pp. 11-20. (25%) [PDF] [PS] [ACM DL]
  8. Cosley, D., Lam, S.K., Albert, I., Konstan, J., and Riedl, J. (2003). Is Seeing Believing? How Recommender Systems Influence Users' Opinions. CHI 2003, Fort Lauderdale, pp. 585-592. (16%) [PDF] [PS] [ACM DL]
  9. Cosley, D., Lawrence, S., and Pennock, D.M. (2002). REFEREE: An open framework for practical testing of recommender systems using ResearchIndex. VLDB 2002, Hong Kong, pp. 35-46. (16%) [PDF] [PS]
A full list of publications is available in my curriculum vita.

Teaching

New 1/20/08: Teaching evals came in for Advanced HCI last semester. It felt like a good course, and the average eval was 4.4/5. Main complaint was "too much work", which I appreciate but I can live with. Now on to improving HCI this semester.

I have taught courses at Cornell University (2006-), the University of Minnesota (2005) and James Madison University (1998-2000). Students and other professors generally claim I'm an excellent teacher. I've taught a number of courses:

I care deeply about teaching; for more, see my teaching statement.

Education

Other professional activities and awards

I have reviewed for a number of conferences and journals. I have served on the Minnesota CS department's faculty recruiting committee and the JMU CS department's curriculum committee. I recently helped write two successful 3-year NSF grants and a Hatch grant. I've received Graduate School (2000) and Guidant Fellowships (2005) at Minnesota. I've had a visiting appointment at Cornell. But I have not yet been a tenure-track faculty member.

Talk schedule

So far, so good: