PARC's Augmented Social Cognition researchers -- who come from cognitive psychology, computer science, HCI, CSCW, and other disciplines -- focus on understanding how to "enhance a group of people's ability to remember, think, and reason". Through Social Web systems like social bookmarking sites, blogs, Wikis, and more, we can finally study, in detail, these types of enhancements on a very large scale.
Here we summarize recent work and early findings such as: (1) how conflict and coordination have played out in Wikipedia, and how social transparency might affect reader trust; (2) how decreasing interaction costs might change participation in social tagging systems; and (3) how computation can help organize user-generated content and metadata.}, acmid = {1559959}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, author = {Chi, Ed H.}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of data}, doi = {10.1145/1559845.1559959}, interhash = {d24a64ce5e95bae4de9329a467342dee}, intrahash = {d09b484b1036ca8273743cac1992dd7f}, isbn = {978-1-60558-551-2}, location = {Providence, Rhode Island, USA}, numpages = {12}, pages = {973--984}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {Augmented social cognition: using social web technology to enhance the ability of groups to remember, think, and reason}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1559845.1559959}, year = 2009 } @article{evans2010elaborated, abstract = {Search engine researchers typically depict search as the solitary activity of an individual searcher. In contrast, results from our critical-incident survey of 150 users on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service suggest that social interactions play an important role throughout the search process. A second survey of also 150 users, focused instead on difficulties encountered during searches, suggests similar conclusions. These social interactions range from highly coordinated collaborations with shared goals to loosely coordinated collaborations in which only advice is sought. Our main contribution is that we have integrated models from previous work in sensemaking and information-seeking behavior to present a canonical social model of user activities before, during, and after a search episode, suggesting where in the search process both explicitly and implicitly shared information may be valuable to individual searchers. We seek to situate collaboration in these search episodes in the context of our developed model for social search. We discuss factors that influence social interactions and content sharing during search activities. We also explore the relationship between social interactions, motivations, and query needs. Finally, we introduce preliminary findings from the second survey on difficult and failed search efforts, discussing how query needs and social interactions may differ in cases of search failures.}, author = {Evans, Brynn M. and Chi, Ed H.}, doi = {10.1016/j.ipm.2009.10.012}, interhash = {5a3bc1b41dd288e1cf632f658a4d97ed}, intrahash = {90594e966a51f2f97abcb05b3c967ab4}, issn = {0306-4573}, journal = {Information Processing & Management}, number = 6, pages = {656--678}, title = {An elaborated model of social search}, url = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306457309001332}, volume = 46, year = 2010 } @article{chi2009information, abstract = {For reasons ranging from obligation to curiosity, users have a strong inclination to seek information from others during the search process. Search systems using statistical analytics over traces left behind by others can help support the search experience.}, author = {Chi, Ed H.}, doi = {10.1109/MC.2009.87}, interhash = {ad763605bf8e6ed18991d696613e8c7c}, intrahash = {11a487805772c784090cf3c2c1594661}, journal = {Computer}, number = 3, pages = {42--46}, publisher = {IEEE}, title = {Information Seeking Can Be Social}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MC.2009.87}, volume = 42, year = 2009 } @inproceedings{chi2008understanding, abstract = {Given the rise in popularity of social tagging systems, it seems only natural to ask how efficient is the organically evolved tagging vocabulary in describing underlying document objects? Does this distributed process really provide a way to circumnavigate the traditional "vocabulary problem" with ontology? We analyze a social tagging site, namely del.icio.us, with information theory in order to evaluate the efficiency of this social tagging site for encoding navigation paths to information sources. We show that information theory provides a natural and interesting way to understand this efficiency - or the descriptive, encoding power of tags. Our results indicate the efficiency of tags appears to be waning. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide insight into how our methods can be used to design more usable social tagging software.}, acmid = {1379110}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, author = {Chi, Ed H. and Mytkowicz, Todd}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia}, doi = {10.1145/1379092.1379110}, interhash = {81c80283290d396a41015d0df11822c7}, intrahash = {d44d1c9a48f5b676388ffbc90c7577ba}, isbn = {978-1-59593-985-2}, location = {Pittsburgh, PA, USA}, numpages = {8}, pages = {81--88}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {Understanding the efficiency of social tagging systems using information theory}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1379092.1379110}, year = 2008 } @inproceedings{evans2008towards, abstract = {Search engine researchers typically depict search as the solitary activity of an individual searcher. In contrast, results from our critical-incident survey of 150 users on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service suggest that social interactions play an important role throughout the search process. Our main contribution is that we have integrated models from previous work in sensemaking and information seeking behavior to present a canonical social model of user activities before, during, and after search, suggesting where in the search process both explicitly and implicitly shared information may be valuable to individual searchers.}, acmid = {1460641}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, author = {Evans, Brynn M. and Chi, Ed H.}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work}, doi = {10.1145/1460563.1460641}, interhash = {8ee7d17052c9334c24a2a6a6c829fed0}, intrahash = {05c78e64316f04208433b52b1d0a4bc7}, isbn = {978-1-60558-007-4}, location = {San Diego, CA, USA}, numpages = {10}, pages = {485--494}, publisher = {ACM}, series = {CSCW '08}, title = {Towards a model of understanding social search}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1460563.1460641}, year = 2008 } @article{mytkowicz2007understandnavig, abstract = {Given the rise in popularity of social tagging systems, it seems only natural to ask how efficient is the organically evolved vocabulary in describing any underlying document objects? Does this distributed process really provide a way to circumnavigate the traditional categorization problem with ontologies? We analyze a social tagging site, namely del.icio.us, with information theory in order to evaluate the efficiency of this social tagging site for navigation to information sources. We show that over time, del.icio.us is becoming harder and harder to navigate and provide an evaluation metric, namely entropy, that can be used to evaluate and drive system design choices. }, author = {Chi, Ed H. and Mytkowicz, Todd}, interhash = {304a9bcd66c9b221ed77fd478692b828}, intrahash = {5a09a3657d30b8f1119e42a8a5da1ff7}, journal = {In proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'07)}, title = {Understanding Navigability of Social Tagging Systems}, url = {http://www.viktoria.se/altchi/index.php?action=showsubmission&id=39}, year = 2007 } @inproceedings{chi2008understanding, abstract = {Given the rise in popularity of social tagging systems, it seems only natural to ask how efficient is the organically evolved tagging vocabulary in describing underlying document objects? Does this distributed process really provide a way to circumnavigate the traditional "vocabulary problem" with ontology? We analyze a social tagging site, namely del.icio.us, with information theory in order to evaluate the efficiency of this social tagging site for encoding navigation paths to information sources. We show that information theory provides a natural and interesting way to understand this efficiency - or the descriptive, encoding power of tags. Our results indicate the efficiency of tags appears to be waning. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide insight into how our methods can be used to design more usable social tagging software.}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, author = {Chi, Ed H. and Mytkowicz, Todd}, booktitle = {HT '08: Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia}, doi = {10.1145/1379092.1379110}, interhash = {81c80283290d396a41015d0df11822c7}, intrahash = {dfa880e6d3e33d0aeb357396fb1833cd}, isbn = {978-1-59593-985-2}, location = {Pittsburgh, PA, USA}, pages = {81--88}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {Understanding the efficiency of social tagging systems using information theory}, url = {http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1379110&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=37458772&CFTOKEN=13998061&ret=1}, year = 2008 }