Konstan on Harnessing Knowledge in Online Communities

This week we are kicking off the Communication and Information Sciences PhD program's new focus area in Social Informatics with visiting speakers. The first talk is:

Help is Out There: Online Community, Community Artifacts, and a New Way of Harnessing Knowledge
   
Joseph A. Konstan, University of Minnesota

Wednesday January 12th @ 15:30 POST 127

Abstract: Have a question? Go to Wikipedia. Or browse a discipline-specific archive. Or even just post it online and hope people will help. This talk discusses several studies that explore how online communities create and organize information. From these, we can draw lessons on how social psychology, economics, and other sciences of human behavior can be harnessed to understand and then design effective online communities. In particular, we look at cases where computation and machine learning have the potential to improve the functioning of such communities.

Joseph A. Konstan is Distinguished McKnight University Professor, Distinguished University Teaching Professor and Associate Department Head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota.  His research addresses a variety of human-computer interaction issues, including personalization (particularly through recommender systems), eliciting on-line participation, and designing computer systems to improve public health. He is probably best known for his work in collaborative filtering recommenders (the GroupLens project), and for his work in online HIV prevention.  Dr. Konstan received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1993.  He is a Fellow of the ACM, Past-President of ACM SIGCHI, the 4500-member Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction, and a member of the ACM Council.  He chaired the first ACM Conference on Recommender Systems in 2007, and is chair of CHI 2012.

The other events are:

Working in Industry Research Organizations, and Academia: A Panel on Life After Graduate School - Nathan Dwyer, Joseph A. Konstan, Patricia Schank, and Mark Schlager - Thursday January 13th @ 16:30 POST 127

Developing, Sustaining, and Analyzing an Online Education Community of Practice - Mark Schlager and Patricia Schank - Friday January 14th 14:30 Hamilton 3F.

The visiting speakers are sponsored as advisory board members of NSF VOSS grant #0943147: Understanding Distributed Socio-Technical Systems, Daniel Suthers PI.