Les Nelson

Short and tweet: experiments on recommending content from information streams

More and more web users keep up with newest information through information streams such as the popular micro-blogging website Twitter. In this paper we studied content recommendation on Twitter to better direct user attention. In a modular approach, we explored three separate dimensions in designing such a recommender: content sources, topic interest models for users, and social voting. We implemented 12 recommendation engines in the design space we formulated, and deployed them to a recommender service on the web to gather feedback from real Twitter users. The best performing algorithm improved the percentage of interesting content to 72% from a baseline of 33%. We conclude this work by discussing the implications of our recommender design and how our design can generalize to other information streams.

Online gaming motivations scale: development and validation

Understanding gaming motivations is important given the growing trend of incorporating game-based mechanisms in non-gaming applications. In this paper, we describe the development and validation of an online gaming motivations scale based on a 3-factor model. Data from 2,071 US participants and 645 Hong Kong and Taiwan participants is used to provide a cross-cultural validation of the developed scale. Analysis of actual in-game behavioral metrics is also provided to demonstrate predictive validity of the scale.

SparTag.us: a low cost tagging system for foraging of web content

Tagging systems such as del.icio.us and Diigo have become important ways for users to organize information gathered from the Web. However, despite their popularity among early adopters, tagging still incurs a relatively high interaction cost for the general users. We introduce a new tagging system called SparTag.us, which uses an intuitive Click2Tag technique to provide in situ, low cost tagging of web content. SparTag.us also lets users highlight text snippets and automatically collects tagged or highlighted paragraphs into a system-created notebook, which can be later browsed and searched. We report several user studies aimed at evaluating Click2Tag and SparTag.us.

It's Not in Their Tweets: Modeling Topical Expertise of Twitter Users

One of the key challenges for users of social media is judging the topical expertise of other users in order to select trustful information sources about specific topics and to judge credibility of content produced by others. In this paper, we explore the usefulness of different types of user-related data for making sense about the topical expertise of Twitter users. Types of user-related data include messages a user authored or re-published, biographical information a user published on his/her profile page and information about user lists to which a user belongs. We conducted a user study that explores how useful different types of data are for informing humans expertise judgements. We then used topic modeling based on different types of data to build and assess computational expertise models of Twitter users. We use We follow directories as a proxy measurement for perceived expertise in this assessment. Our findings show that different types of user-related data indeed differ substantially in their ability to inform computational expertise models and humanss expertise judgements. Tweets and retweets - which are often used in literature for gauging the expertise area of users - are surprisingly useless for inferring the expertise topics of their authors and are outperformed by other types of user-related data such as information about users list memberships. Our results have implications for algorithms, user interfaces and methods that focus on capturing expertise of social media users.

Modeling problem difficulty and expertise in stackoverflow

Supporting expert communities is becoming a must-have capability whenever users are helping each other solve problems. Examples of these expert communities abound in the form of enthusiast communities, both inside and outside of organizations. In order to achieve success, these systems have to connect several different actors. In this paper we aim to inform the design of these Hybrid Intelligence Systems through the investigation of StackOverflow. Our focus in this paper is to develop indicators for hard problems and experts. The long-term goal of our study is to examine how complex problems are handled and dispatched across multiple experts. We outline implications for modeling these attributes and how they might inform better design in the future.

Café life in the digital age: augmenting information flow in a café-work-entertainment space

In this report we detail our experience of designing and installing a large-screen public, interactive community board, the eyeCanvas, in a neighbourhood café and art gallery in San Francisco. Features of the community board include the ability to display content related to the café, including menus, nightly events and artists work; the possibility of signing up for the cafes email newsletter; and a touch-screen, finger scribble application that allows comments to be left. We describe the café, the eyeCanvas interactive display, the contents that are posted to the display comment on the adoption, use and impact of the eyeCanvas display.

Finding the Adaptive Sweet Spot: Balancing Compliance and Achievement in Automated Stress Reduction

Automated coaching systems offer a convenient, cost-effective way to reduce stress, which can be a serious health issue. However, one concern with such systems is compliance; users fail to achieve daily stress reduction goals because goals are too easy or too difficult. To address this, we built DStress (Design for Stress), a theoretically grounded system that sets adaptive goals in three coaching dimensions: Exercise, Meditation and Accessibility. DStress modifies goal-difficulty based on the individuals immediately previous performance. In a 28-day deployment with 65 users, DStress reduced scores on one direct measure of stress almost in half, significantly more than two other non-adaptive coaching strategies. However, on a second direct stress measure, no improvement was found. There were also no improvements on other indirect stress measures. Analysis of 2842 user-generated reports suggests our findings were the result of DStress balancing compliance against the degree of challenge of the goals it would set.

Through the azerothian looking glass: mapping in-game preferences to real world demographics

Examining how in-game behavior preferences map onto real world demographics provides important empirically-derived insights into how to match game-based mechanisms to target demographic segments. Using behavioral and demographic data from 1,037 World of Warcraft players, we use multiple regressions to provide this mapping. Given current interest in gamifying applications, we believe these findings are relevant for both gaming and non-gaming research.

Repurposing: Techniques for reuse and integration of interactive systems

This paper explores technical appropriation and integration of information applications. We introduce an approach for recasting applications for use in emerging and unanticipated user settings; that is, settings that were not accounted for in the applications original design process. Based on our previous research into novel interfaces for supporting communication and collaboration, we identify six reuse and integration techniques we call repurposing and show how they may be used in a design extension of a standard email client that preserves its familiar operations

Interactive Community Bulletin Boards as Conversational Hubs and Sites for Playful Visual Repartee

In this paper we describe an interactive community bulletin board installed within a neighborhood cafe and art gallery, and the interactions that take place around and through the board. The board features cafe information and email list sign up, but also allows customers to create publicly displayed, persistent, finger-drawn, digital scribbles. In providing this community composition and posting feature, our board differs from more commonly available designs for one-way advertising of products. Following analysis of the scribbles, and interviews with scribble creators and readers, we offer a brief description of the textual and visual play and repartee patrons engage in. We discuss content forms posted to the board, differentiating between solitary and collaborative play, messaging, and conversational exchange. Our discussion addresses open questions regarding the perspectives and theories that can be applied to address this new form of site-specific, public media exchange