Richard P. Schuler

Finding your way with CampusWiki: a location-aware wiki

Wikis provide a simple and unique approach to collaborative authoring, allowing any member of the community to contribute new, or change existing information. However, Wikis are typically disconnected from the physical context of users who are utilizing or creating content, resulting in suboptimal support for geographic communities. In addition, geographic communities might find the highly skewed generation of content by a few individuals problematic. Here we present research into addressing these challenges through location-awareness and lightweight user content rating mechanisms. We describe one such location-aware Wiki, CampusWiki and initial results from a field study demonstrating the value of location-linked content and the rating approach. We conclude with a discussion of design implications.

The doing of doing stuff: understanding the coordination of social group-activities

This paper explores how the adoption of mobile and social computing technologies has impacted upon the way in which we coordinate social group-activities. We present a diary study of 36 individuals that provides an overview of how group coordination is currently performed as well as the challenges people face. Our findings highlight that people primarily use open-channel communication tools (e.g., text messaging, phone calls, email) to coordinate because the alternatives are seen as either disrupting or curbing to the natural conversational processes. Yet the use of open-channel tools often results in conversational overload and a significant disparity of work between coordinating individuals. This in turn often leads to a sense of frustration and confusion about coordination details. We discuss how the findings argue for a significant shift in our thinking about the design of coordination support systems.

Telling calls: facilitating mobile phone conversation grounding and management

Current cell phone designs are limited by the information a caller can provide to the receiver at the time of a call. As a result callers are handicapped in effectively negotiating interaction commitment from the receiver, and perhaps more importantly, receivers are unable to make informed call handling decisions. To examine the nature of this information gap we 1) developed Telling Calls, a mobile phone application which allows users to provide and receive information such as what the call is about and the circumstances of the caller under which it is being made, and 2) conducted a qualitative field study (36 users) and a quantitative field study (30 users) of Telling Calls use. Together these studies provide insights on how additional caller generated information shared at the time of call handling effectively improves the process of negotiating interaction commitment, and establishing common ground.

To answer or not to answer: that is the question for cell phone users

People are constantly making decisions to answer or ignore cell phone calls based on inferences derived from partial information about the incoming call. To gain an understanding of this information deficit we conducted a survey study of cell phone call handling practices. The results highlight the type and extent of information desired about incoming cell phone calls. It also shows that desired information is largely unknown and often misattributed by the receiver. Our findings can be used by designers to prioritize the presentation of additional types of call related information on cell phone displays, and in so doing, empower users to make informed call handling decisions.

Towards an understanding of social inference opportunities in social computing

Social computing applications are transforming the way we make new social ties, work, learn and play, thus becoming an essential part our social fabric. As a result, people and systems routinely make inferences about peoples personal information based on their disclosed personal information. Despite the significance of this phenomenon the opportunity to make social inferences about users and how this process can be managed is poorly understood. In this paper we 1) outline why social inferences are important to study in the context of social computing applications, 2) how we can model, understand and predict social inference opportunities 3) highlight the need for social inference management systems, and 4) discuss the design space and associated research challenges. Collectively, this paper provides the first systematic overview for social inference research in the area of social computing.

Common attributes in an unusual context: predicting the desirability of a social match

Social matching systems recommend people to other people. With the widespread adoption of smartphones, mobile social matching systems could potentially transform our social landscape. However, we have a limited understanding of what makes a good social match in the mobile context. We present a theoretical framework which outlines how a users context and the rarity of different affinity measures in various contexts (match rarity) can be used to provide valuable social matches. We suggest that if a user attribute is very rare in a particular context, users will generally be more interested in an affinity match. We conducted a survey study to assess this framework with 117 respondents. We found that both context and match rarity significantly influence interest in a social match. These results validate the key aspects of the framework. We discuss the results in terms of implications for social matching system design.