News

The new ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS) is live and accepting submissions! TiiS has the goal of encouraging and disseminating research that combines methods and ideas from artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Further information, and a link to Manuscript Central for submitting your paper, is available at: TiiS Home Page

Our Wikipedia research group has been leading a long-running effort to create a formal policy on research on Wikipedia for researchers everywhere. Aaron Halfaker and Bryan Song have been leading the effort, which is now in the formal RFC stage, the last stage before (hoped-for!) approval. Check out its Wikipedia Page and participate in the discussion and !vote.

We had a great time at WikiSym last October. Our students Aaron Halfaker and Michael Ekstrand were both presenting work they had first-authored -- both of which had been nominated for Best Paper. Michael ended up winning for our paper "rv you're dumb: Identifying Discarded Work in Wiki Article History".

The ACM just announced their new Fellows --- and included me on the list!

We've begun work on a new project on Online Volunteer Communities. The idea is to help people through their lifecycle as contributors to online resources like Wikipedia.

Research Interests

My research focus is on collaborative systems that support human interaction through computer systems. My career goal is to understand how to develop and apply computer technology to the problems of human organizations.

One of the biggest such problems is getting the right information to the right people. The Internet has democratized the publishing process. Now, anyone who wants can publish anything they want, just by creating a Web site. We humans are hopelessly overmatched by the increasing volumes of information that are published. Collaborative filtering is a technology that enables us to all work together to sift through the millions of documents on any topic to find those that are most appropriate for each of us. Collaborative filtering works by learning which kinds of documents each of us likes, and finding other people who share out interests.

Across our entire research program, our goal is to understand how computers can be used to help people process information more efficiently, and work together better.

I am currently involved in several research projects to explore these topics.