Coordination and Social Sensemaking

The amount of information available to individuals today is enormous and
rapidly increasing. Continued progress in science, education, and technology
is fundamentally dependent on making sense of and finding insights in
overwhelming amounts of data. However, human cognition, while unparalleled at
discovering patterns and linking seemingly-disparate concepts, is also limited
in the amount of information it can process at once. One promising solution to
this problem is through social collaboration, in which groups of individuals
work together to produce knowledge and solve problems that exceed any
individual's cognitive capacity.

In this talk I describe a series of studies examining the importance of
coordination in harnessing the power of the crowds for complex information
processing tasks in Wikipedia and beyond. I also present research into
visualization and machine learning tools aimed at increasing the effectiveness
of these systems. Finally, I discuss early forays into extending social
collaboration to support insight and discovery.

Speaker Biography:

Aniket Kittur is an assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction
Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.  He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in
cognitive psychology and did his undergraduate work at Princeton University in
psychology and computer science. His research focuses on understanding and
augmenting how humans make sense of large amounts of information.  At the
group level he studies the dynamics of social collaborative systems such as
Wikipedia and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and how visualization and machine
learning tools can increase their effectiveness.  At the individual level, his
research interests center on human information processing in categorization
and memory.  His research employs multiple complementary techniques, including
empirical experiments, statistical and computational modeling, visualization,
data mining, and machine learning.

Funding for this seminar series has been provided by Yahoo!

Relevant URL(S): kittur.org

For more information please contact: Michael Bernstein, msbernst@mit.edu