Social Computing

ChromeView: A Plugin Designed to Fight Selective Exposure

"Algorithm models and machine learning systems. Whether we realize it or not, our daily lives center around them," explained a team of Carnegie Mellon University undergraduate students in their paper for Jason Hong's Social Web course. From recommending additional purchases to trading stock on Wall Street, algorithms help us navigate the overwhelming amount of information and decisions in front of us. However, they may be more involved in our daily lives than people care to admit.

Skip the Password, Use "Secret Knock" Instead

Article originally posted on www.cs.cmu.edu

In the days of Prohibition, thirsty men and women used a secret knock to enter speakeasies. Occasionally, a nefarious sort who'd been rejected from the club would study the secret knock from afar and use it to gain admission.

HCII Collects Best Paper and Accessibility Challenge Awards at W4A

Web for All Accessibility Challenge Award

The Human-Computer Interaction Institute had a strong presence at the 14^th International Web for All (W4A) conference in Perth, Australia, where researchers accepted both the Best Technical Paper award and won the Accessibility Challenge.

Students Create App To Help Visually Impaired Identify Email Phishing Attacks

Thanks to screen readers, 285 million visually impaired people worldwide are able to browse the Internet by responding to audio readings of image descriptions and text on websites. But how can these unique users avoid phishing attacks, malicious links disguised as innocuous ones? As one group of CyLab students will tell you: there’s an app for that, and they’re creating it.

Kulkarni Shares Talkabout Research on CNBC

In a recent article on CNBC, Assistant Professor Chinmay Kulkarni shared his research that is bringing together individuals with very different viewpoints. Kulkarni's research focuses on building technology that can support and improve how people live and learn. So he was quick to spot an opportunity following the election to connect groups of people with differing opinions for a positive gain.

"It is easy to say, 'I'm going to talk to somebody else and try to understand them,' but without the right circumstances, you're quickly at each other's throat," Kulkarni said.

Friends Help Friends Feel Better on Facebook

Personal interactions on Facebook can have a major impact on a person's feelings of well-being and satisfaction with life just as much as getting married or having a baby, a new study by Carnegie Mellon University and Facebook researchers shows.

But not just any interaction has these positive effects. Passively reading posts or one-click feedback such as "likes" don't move the needle. What really makes people feel good is when those they know and care about write personalized posts or comments.

Kraut Receives NSF Grant in Support of Online Communities

Despite the existence of successful online groups, the majority of newly created ones fail. They don’t survive, fail to attract enough digital users, or don’t meet goals their founders set for them. Herbert A. Simon Professor of Human-Computer Interaction Robert Kraut has dedicated much of his recent research to investigating why some groups succeed where others fail.

Digital Footprints

Personal information management and privacy is a major and increasing challenge. New internet architectures will make people and their interactions more transparent to others than ever, and increase our digital footprints online. In a set of projects, we are studying user perspectives on anonymity and privacy online.

Technology-Enabled Role-Playing in Design

College professors frequently use role-playing in class as a way to engage their students and enhance the learning experience. However, role-playing often creates an unbalanced classroom, where the majority of students are observing and only a few actors are “engaged.” This project investigates using technology to engage all students during classroom role-play. In particular, we want to explore social media platforms such as Twitter, which have been shown to enhance classroom engagement.

Supporting Newcomer Socialization in Online Production Communities

Online production communities are becoming increasingly important, because they are creating the software that drives the Internet, generating valuable scientific data and building history’s largest encyclopedia. In the face of inevitable turnover, every online community must incorporate successive generations of newcomers to survive. Newcomers are a source of content, labor, new ideas, and an audience.

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