CSCW and IoT: we should study this

This paper in five sentences: People should look at IoT through the lens of CSCW and here’s why. IoT is objects cooperating or “socialising” with each other and with people. The objects and people need to coordinate to be effective. Context needs to be taken into account. We should study how people use IoT technology…

Soylent: not the beverage, the MS Word add-in

Moderate googling did not reveal any mention of Soylent data being used to train AIs, which surprises me…  The fact that I hadn’t heard of Soylent before this paper also surprised me—why isn’t it so popular that “Soylent” is a household name?  (Well, it kind of is, but it’s in reference to the soy-based beverage…

Building offline social capital by means of Facebook: Reading Reflection #5

First, I’d like to draw our attention to the adorable pre-Facebook networking site Netville: ‘‘Netville’’ residents with broadband Internet connections and access to a local online community discussion board were more likely to be involved with their neighbors than were their non-wired peers: They recognized three times as many and talked to twice as many….

The dawn of feeds: Reading reflection #4

[P]eople who agreed in the past are likely to agree again So simple, and yet this heuristic is the bedrock of every modern recommendation algorithm.  This is “Because you watched X” on Netflix and “Others who viewed Y also viewed” on Amazon, and the basic idea behind our Facebook feeds.  Behold: collaborative filtering. Before, there…

Social Translucence: Reading Reflection #2

While reading the first half of this paper, in the back of my mind was the thought: “2000…what technology did we have then…I wonder what this Babble is going to be?”  When I actually got to the section on the prototype: “Oh my G**, were these authors the first ones to conceptualize modern chats?!  Holy…

Crowd-sourced intelligence & digital authoritarianism: Molly’s intro

I come from faraway Maryland to pursue my Masters in CS.  My undergrad is in math from UMBC (University of Maryland – Baltimore County).  I worked at the MITRE Corporation for three years after college, working test and evaluation for national security-related research projects, primarily related to crowd-sourced anticipatory intelligence: using “wisdom of the crowds”…