Eric Gilbert

Predicting tie strength with social media

Social media treats all users the same: trusted friend or total stranger, with little or nothing in between. In reality, relationships fall everywhere along this spectrum, a topic social science has investigated for decades under the theme of tie strength. Our work bridges this gap between theory and practice. In this paper, we present a predictive model that maps social media data to tie strength. The model builds on a dataset of over 2,000 social media ties and performs quite well, distinguishing between strong and weak ties with over 85% accuracy. We complement these quantitative findings with interviews that unpack the relationships we could not predict. The paper concludes by illustrating how modeling tie strength can improve social media design elements, including privacy controls, message routing, friend introductions and information prioritization.

Understanding deja reviewers

People who review products on the web invest considerable time and energy in what they write. So why would someone write a review that restates earlier reviews? Our work looks to answer this question. In this paper, we present a mixed-method study of deja reviewers, latecomers who echo what other people said. We analyze nearly 100,000 Amazon.com reviews for signs of repetition and find that roughly 10-15% of reviews substantially resemble previous ones. Using these algorithmically-identified reviews as centerpieces for discussion, we interviewed reviewers to understand their motives. An overwhelming number of reviews partially explains deja reviews, but deeper factors revolving around an individuals status in the community are also at work. The paper concludes by introducing a new idea inspired by our findings: a self-aware community that nudges members toward community-wide goals.

The network in the garden: designing social media for rural life.

History repeatedly demonstrates that rural communities have unique technological needs. Yet little is known about how rural communities use modern technologies, which therefore results in a collective lack knowledge about how to design for rural life. To address this gap, the present empirical article investigates behavioral differences between more than 3,000 rural and urban social media users. With a data set collected from a broadly popular social network site, the current work analyzes users’ profiles, 340,000 online friendships, and 200,000 interpersonal messages. Based on social capital theory, differences are predicted between rural and urban users, and strong evidence supports the present hypotheses—namely, rural people articulate far fewer friends online, and those friends live much closer to home. Results indicate that the groups have substantially different gender distributions and use privacy features differently. The article concludes with a discussion of the design implications drawn from these findings; most important, designers should reconsider the binary friend-or-not model to allow for incremental trust building.

CodeSaw: a social visualization of distributed software development

We present CodeSaw, a social visualization of distributed software development. CodeSaw visualizes a distributed software community from two important and independent perspectives: code repositories and project communication. By bringing together both shared artifacts (code) and the talk surrounding those artifacts (project mail), CodeSaw reveals group dynamics that lie buried in existing technologies. This paper describes the visualization and its design process. We apply CodeSaw to a popular open source project, showing how the visualization reveals group dynamics and individual roles. The paper ends with a discussion of the results of an online field study with prominent open source developers. The field study suggests that CodeSaw positively affects communities and provides incentives to distributed developers. Furthermore, an important design lesson from the field study leads us to introduce a novel interaction technique for social visualization called spatial messaging.

Virtual data Grid middleware services for data-intensive science

The GriPhyN virtual data system provides a suite of components and services for data‐intensive sciences that enables scientists to systematically and efficiently describe, discover, and share large‐scale data and computational resources. We describe the design and implementation of such middleware services in terms of a virtual data system interface called Chiron, and present virtual data integration examples from the QuarkNet education project and from functional‐MRI‐based neuroscience research. The Chiron interface also serves as an online ‘educator’ for virtual data applications. Copyright

Using Social Visualization to Motivate Social Production

In this paper we argue that social visualization can motivate contributors to social production projects, such as Wikipedia and open source development. As evidence, we present CodeSaw, a social visualization of open source software development that we studied with real open source communities. CodeSaw mines open source archives to visualize group dynamics that currently lie buried in textual databases. Furthermore, CodeSaw becomes an active social space itself by supporting comments directly inside the visualization. To demonstrate CodeSaw, we apply it to a popular open source project, showing how the visualization reveals group dynamics and individual roles. The paper concludes by presenting evidence that CodeSaw, and social visualization more generally, can motivate contributors to social production projects if the visualization leaves the laboratory and makes it to the community visualized.

The QuarkNet/grid collaborative learning e-Lab

This paper describes a case study that uses grid computing techniques to support the collaborative learning of high school students investigating cosmic rays. Students gather and upload science data to an e-Lab website. They explore those data using techniques from the GriPhyN collaboration. These techniques include virtual data transformations, workflows, metadata cataloging and indexing, data product provenance and persistence, as well as job planners for execution locally and on the grid. Students use web browsers and a custom interface that extends the GriPhyN Chiron portal to perform all of these tasks. They share results in the form of online posters and ask each other questions in this asynchronous environment. Students can discover and extend the research of other students, modeling the processes of modern large-scale scientific collaborations. Also, the e-Lab provides tools for teachers to guide student work throughout an investigation.http://quarknet.uchicago.edu/elab/cosmic

The social implications of an assisted living reminder system

We present the findings of an in situ field study conducted using our assisted living system, I-Living, that aims to enable seniors to live in a cost-effective manner independently. Basing the study on both interviews and diaries provided valuable and well-rounded data. Some of the main findings revealed that seniors will wear small health sensors if designed carefully. The study further reveals that delicate and complicated social structures influence the design space in such communities. The primary contribution of this paper is the pilot study conducted at an assisted living facility. It paints a compelling picture of day-to-day life in a healthcare institution and uncovers broad design implications that apply to a wide range of technologies.