Augmented Social Cognition: Using Social Web technology to enhance the ability of groups to remember, think, and reason

Abstract:
We are experiencing a new Social Web, where people share, communicate, 
commiserate, and have conflicts with each other. As evidenced by 
systems like Wikipedia, Twitter, and delicious.com, these 
environments are turning people into social information foragers and 
sharers. Groups interact to resolve conflicts and jointly make sense 
of topic areas from "Obama and healthcare policy" to "Islam."

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.

Bio:
Ed H. Chi is the area manager and a senior research scientist at Palo 
Alto Research Center's Augmented Social Cognition Group. He leads the 
group in understanding how Web2.0 and Social Computing systems help 
groups of people to remember, think and reason. Ed completed his three 
degrees (B.S., M.S., and Ph.D.) in 6.5 years from University of 
Minnesota, and has been doing research on user interface software 
systems since 1993. He has been featured and quoted in the press, 
including the Economist, Time Magazine, LA Times, and the Associated 
Press.