The Computing Innovation Fellows Project

Posted on: Thursday, May 5th, 2011
Broad Research Area: Databases / Information Retrieval / Data Mining, Graphics / Visualization, HCI / CSCW, Information Systems / Information Science, Social Computing / Social Informatics, Software Engineering, Technology Policy

Research Interests:

Overview: I lead a multidisciplinary group that examines a range of human-centered computing issues. A main area of current research is in “crisis informatics.” This line of research combines human-centered computing and socio-technical empirical study with software engineering; natural language processing and information extraction; information visualization; and network security, privacy and scalability. My group conducts empirical research of on-the-ground emergency activities as well as CMC-based interaction, which has had national and international impact. We continue to drive our results toward design and implementation of new forms of Computer-Mediated Communication for use in crisis situations by both citizens and responders. Our goal is to break new ground on delivering technology innovation to those who are most in need of it.
Background: In an increasingly global society and on a planet experiencing effects of climatic change, large-scale emergencies both instigated by humans and arising from nature can devastate human life and a tightly-woven social fabric. A prevailing hope is that information and communication technology (ICT) aimed at official responders can help reduce impacts of large-scale disruptions, including political crises, natural disasters, pandemics, and terrorist threats. Our program builds on the hopes of ICT, but takes a different approach, focusing instead on an understudied but critical aspect of large-scale emergency response—the needs and roles of members of the public. By viewing the citizenry as a powerful, self-organizing, and collectively intelligent force, ICT can play a transformational role in crisis. Our research aims to leverage the knowledge of members of the public through reuse of publicly available computer mediated communications. The research that our multid isciplinary group will conduct includes the study and integration of heterogeneous information and–with techniques of information extraction through natural language processing as well as trust and reputation modeling–add meta- information to help users assess context, validity, source, credibility, and timeliness to make the best decisions for their highly localized, changing conditions.

Intellectual contributions include the expansion of broad thinking about societal-scale interaction in the area of crisis informatics, and bridging information, cognitive and computer science. This work also includes consideration of implications to emergency management and telecom policy. Innovation will be based on empirical study of CMC and citizen information needs in a range of international crisis events, with the development of methods to analyze such behavior in light of privacy, security, ethical and policy issues. Our project integrates technology and emergency management partners in its mission.
Skills. A CI Fellow working with me is first and foremost encouraged to establish a line of independent research that follows their PhD research trajectory. However, I invite applicants to extend their current research to bridge with our large research venture that includes 7 faculty and numerous graduate students for mutual benefit.

To that end, a number of skills would fit well into our larger research effort: ethnographic research on sociotechnical systems; policy and institutional considerations; systems building of collaborative environments; social network analysis; information visualization; data mining and natural language processing. Previous knowledge and experience with emergency and disaster response is welcomed but not required.

Contact Information:

Email me at email obfuscated - click to reveal and include in the subject line [CI Fellows]. Thanks for your interest!