Loren Terveen
Location: (Minneapolis, MN)
Personal Research Web Page: http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~terveen/
Keywords: social computing, geographically-based online communities, mobile computing, recommender systems, technology-mediated social participation, intelligent user interfaces
Posted on: Friday, April 30th, 2010
Broad Research Area: HCI / CSCW, Mobile / Ubiquitous / Embedded Computing, Social Computing / Social Informatics
Research Interests:
I have three main emphases:
1. Creation of online communities to support groups with a geographical basis. Our first and most successful instance of such a community is Cyclopath.org, a route-finder and geographic wiki for bicyclists. I am very interested in creating geographic wikis for other uses, including parents/families and many environmental applications.
2. Developing and evaluating theory-based mechanisms and guidelines for designing online communities. My collaborators and I have tried out many theories from the social science that address issues such as: what makes people get attached to groups, what motivates people to volunteer, what incentives and appeals elicit more and better contribution to group activities.
3. Creating novel tagging algorithms and interfaces. Developing novel metrics for assessing the quality of folksonomies. Developing theoretical models and interaction techniques that situated tagging with other dynamic interaction phenomena like mixed-initiative dialogue.
I also am devoting efforts to two more self-contained projects:
- Creation of an online community for adolescents to promote behaviors and attitudes that limit the spread of HIV/AIDS. Interesting ethical challenges. Chance to create and test persuasive design ideas.
- Empirical study of what factors influence people’s choice of clothing to wear for the day and how satisfied they are with their choices. Creation of a system to enable people to make better choices.
My colleagues, students, and I apply a mix of methods on our projects, including algorithm development and evaluation, invention of novel interaction techniques, user interface design, qualitative studies, quantitative studies especially field experiments, visualization and interactive data exploration, and statistical methods. We work hard to create systems that attract an active user community (like Cyclopath and MovieLens), since these form a very valuable experimental infrastructure in which we can deploy and evaluate empirically new ideas.
Contact Information:
Email: terveen@cs.umn.edu Phone: 612 624-8310
