Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

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.