Seminar: CIS Research Panel on Social Computing (10/2/2008)

This year the Communication and Information Sciences program will be holding a series of research panels. Each panel will include several faculty from more than one department who share a research area. Faculty will summarize their current research and outline opportunities for collaboration, whether you are a colleague or a student seeking research project or dissertation opportunities.

This Thursday 10/02 at 4:30 PM in POST 126 our first panel will be on Social Computing (a.k.a. Social Informatics). Rich Gazan (ICS/LIS), Devan Rosen (Speech), and Dan Suthers (ICS) will be panelists.

Rich Gazan

Dr. Gazan holds a dual-culture faculty position at the University of Hawaii that's at the intersection of Information & Computer Sciences and Library & Information Science. He is interested in how people integrate diverse types of knowledge, from collections of diverse documents to the work of people with different kinds of expertise.

His research is currently focused on investigating how people share, evaluate and integrate diverse types of information in online communities, using the Answerbag question answering community (http://www.answerbag.com/) as a primary testbed. This builds on his past research with collaborative digital library development projects, where scientists and professionals confronted many of the same challenges while attempting to integrate diverse collections of information, and the work of people with diverse expertise.

Devan Rosen

Dr. Rosen is faculty in the Department of Speech. His research focuses on developing theoretical and methodological advancements to the study of communication, studying the self-organization of communication networks in small groups and larger organizations. He studies communication from a dynamic perspective, developing theories and methods that foster the longitudinal analysis of communicative interaction.

Theoretically, he has been developing a model of cooperative evolution in relational human interaction, flock theory. Flock theory models situations, specifically on organizational settings, where groups of people can develop and maintain a manner of interaction that catalyzes egalitarian, dissipated leadership and the emergence of creativity. He has extended this theoretical work to to model larger, bipartite networks in an effort to stress the importance of knowledge sharing and knowledge network navigation.

Methodologically, his research has produced methods for the study of organizational networks on the task group and organization level and network analytic methods for the structural and content analyses of chat-based communicative interaction. He is cooperating in research developing neural networks for multi-lingual text analysis.

Daniel Suthers

Dr. Suthers is Professor in the department of Information and Computer Sciences, where he directs the Laboratory for Interactive Learning Technologies (http://lilt.ics.hawaii.edu), and is chair of the interdisciplinary Communication and Information Sciences program (http://www.hawaii.edu/cis/).

Dr. Suthers' research is generally concerned with cognitive, social and computational perspectives on designing and evaluating software for learning, collaboration, and community. His current focus is on social affordances of digital media--how software interfaces both influence and are appropriated by participants ranging from collaborating dyads to online social networks. One line of research (representational guidance) has examined how software interfaces that enable learners to construct, examine, and manipulate representations of their evolving knowledge influences discourse between learners and learning outcomes. A complementary line of research (representational practices) examines how participants appropriate the potentials offered by the representational and interactional resources of the technological environment in accomplishing their work. Suthers & colleagues are also studying social affordances in online social networks, such as pathways by which participants can form relationships and create and discover synergistic value in the larger community.

To facilitate and reconcile these lines of research, Dr. Suthers and colleagues are developing an analytic framework that attempts to bridge the gap between micro-analysis of interaction and statistical aggregation by enabling the scale-up of interaction analysis.