Blog for the Theory and Practice of Social Machines Project

Archive for the ‘Research Papers’ Category

A First Look at Health Social Machines

In health and wellness, Research Papers, social machine study on March 5, 2013 at 7:35 pm

In preparation for SOCM2013, Dan and I performed a preliminary analysis of the wide and varied kinds of web sites, apps and online communities devised, broadly, to help people live healthier lives.  For this investigation we included  preventative wellness sites, sites and apps devised for disease management, crowd-based sensemaking, and categorised the purposes each served.  We also looked at the social components of these sites, specifically at the roles assumed by individuals and groups, and the roles of social (group) pressure and consensus in various kinds of support, such as disease intervention.

A draft pre-print of the paper is available here.

DataPalette at CHI2013

In Interaction/Interfaces, Research Papers on January 29, 2013 at 6:00 pm

We are pleased to announce that one of our first SOCIAM conference papers has been accepted for presentation at CHI2013 in Paris on April 27, 2013.

Our paper, “Carpé Data: Supporting Serendipitous Data Integration in Personal Information Management” discusses 3 studies examining goal of enabling end-users to bring together arbitrary data sources from around the Web for performing more effective sensemaking.

Our two pre-studies demonstrated that, despite the convergence seen on the Web, people still regularly draw information from a plurality of data sources when making important decisions, and that these data sources extensively exhibit primarily simple kinds of heterogeneity.

Our final study in the paper is an evaluation of DataPalette, an interface that supports direct-manipulation-based end-user data integration  to solve the most common types of heterogeneity they would encounter.

See a video of DataPalette in action: DataPalette demonstration video

The paper will be presented by Max Van Kleek and Daniel Alexander Smith at CHI2013 on April 27, 2013 in Paris, France. A copy will be available on the ACM Digital Library and is on ePrints.