Mikhil Masli

masli [at] cs [dot] umn [dot] edu

Room 4-192, Kenneth H. Keller Hall,
200 Union Street S.E.,
Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA.

about me

Hi there, welcome! I'm a 4th year PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA. I work in the areas of human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work and social computing under the guidance of my advisor Dr Loren Terveen. I work in this wonderful group of researchers called GroupLens Research. Prior to graduate studies, I completed the Bachelor of Technology (BTech) degree from the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, one of India's premier engineering universities and worked as a software design engineer at Microsoft R&D, Hyderabad, India.

And, you can also read my blog: Mikhil's (Academic and Related) Blog.

projects

cyclopath: a geowiki

Cyclopath is a geowiki for twin cities bicyclists. Being a wiki, it depends on its users to contribute information in order to be useful. Contributions can be made in the form of map editing, rating roads, tagging roads and points, and adding notes among other ways. I've been working on the Cyclopath project from Fall 2008 till today.

inclusive planet: social web for the visually-impaired

As an intern at Microsoft Research India during the summer of 2011, I studied how visually-impaired people (mostly from developing countries like India and Turkey) use an online content-sharing and social community. The particular community I studied is called Inclusive Planet. I was guided by Ed Cutrell during this research.

timeflash: a micro-calendar

Timeflash is like Twitter, but for events: it is a micro-calendar. Timeflash was developed at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Centre (Cambridge, MA) to introduce openness and sharing into enterprise calendaring. I worked on this project with Werner Geyer, Casey Dugan, and Beth Brownholtz during an internship in the summer of 2010.

studying twitter overload

In today's social web, there is so much content that social networks generate. Twitter, especially generates so much for a person, that we wonder how much a person can possibly keep up. Morten Warncke-Wang, Ted Johnson and I developed a simulation model to investigate this question.

personalised adaptive keyboard

Soft keyboards have the opportunity to do wonderful things with customising their keys for different users. We (Siddharth Ramakrishnan and I) designed and did preliminary evaluations on a keyboard that changed the shapes of its keys based on typing behaviour and letter prediction using dictionaries.

better association rule mining

Performing association rule mining (a popular data mining technique) on data sets that spread across multiple heterogenous databases is quite a complicated problm. We (Shruthi Prabhakara and I) modified one of the well known data structures for association rule mining to make the algorithm work better.

publications

2012

Mikhil Masli and Loren Terveen. Evaluating Compliance-Without-Pressure Techniques for Increasing Participation in Online Communities. Accepted to the 2012 ACM conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI '12), Austin, TX, USA.

2011

Mikhil Masli. Crowdsourcing Maps. In IEEE Computer, Issue No. 11 (November), pages 90 - 93.

Mikhil Masli, Reid Priedhorsky, and Loren Terveen. Task Specialization in Social Production Communities: The Case of Geographic Volunteer Work. In Proceedings of the 2011 AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM '11), Barcelona, Spain.

Mikhil Masli, Werner Geyer, Casey Dugan, and Beth Browholtz. The Design and Use of Tentative Events for Time-based Social Coordination in the Enterprise. In Proceedings of the 2011 ACM conference on the World Wide Web (WWW '11), Hyderabad, India.

Katherine Panciera, Mikhil Masli, and Loren Terveen. "How should I go from ___ to ___ without getting killed?": motivation and benefits in open collaboration. In Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym '11), Mountain View, CA, USA.

Werner Geyer, Casey Dugan, Beth Browholtz, Mikhil Masli, Elizabeth Daly, and David Millen. An Open, Social Calendar for the Enterprise: Timely? In Proceedings of the 2011 ACM conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI '11), Vancouver, Canada.

2010

Reid Priedhorsky, Mikhil Masli, and Loren Terveen. Eliciting and focusing geographic volunteer work. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '10), Savannah, GA, USA.