Xianghua Ding

Nomatic: location by, for, and of crowds

In this paper we present a social and technical architecture which will enable the study of localization from the perspective of crowds. Our research agenda is to leverage new computing opportunities that arise when many people are simultaneously localizing themselves. By aggregating this and other types of context information we intend to develop a statistically powerful data set that can be used by urban planners, users and their software. This paper presents an end-to-end strategy, motivated with preliminary user studies, for lowering the social and technical barriers to sharing context information. The primary technology through which we motivate participation is an intelligent context-aware instant messaging client called Nomatic*Gaim. We investigate social barriers to participation with a small informal user study evaluating automatic privacy mechanisms which give people control over their context disclosure. We then analyze some preliminary data from an early deployment. Finally we show how leveraging these mass-collaborations could help to improve Nomatic*Gaim by allowing it to infer position to place mappings.

Reliving the Past & Making a Harmonious Society Today: A Study of Elderly Electronic Hackers in China

This paper tells a story of DIY (do it yourself) making that does not neatly fit more familiar narratives of making: as individual empowerment, as a democratizing force, and as technoscientific innovation. Drawing on ethnographic research with a collective of elderly electronic hackers in China, we provide insights into the socio-technical and politico-economic processes of hacking and making. This paper examines how the activity of making functioned for elderly DIY enthusiasts as way of remaking and reliving the past and as a means for expressing class belonging and citizenship. We show that making and hacking is not practiced in a void independent of social, political or economic forces. Rather, making unfolds in relation to, and is contingent on, societal norms and specific techno-cultural histories. As much as hacking empowers certain people, it excludes others and functions as a site for the exercise of power and social distinction making.

Meanings and boundaries of scientific software sharing

In theory, software, like other digital artifacts, can be freely copied and distributed. In practice, however, its effective flow is conditioned on various technical and social factors. In this paper, drawing on ethnographic work primarily with a bio-informatics research team in China, we report on meanings of scientific software sharing as embedded in social practices of learning, apprenticeship, membership, publication, and reputation. We illustrate that while free flow is important, boundary management is equally important for the effective travel of software to its appropriate destinations. Our study highlights a number of issues that are important to consider for effectively supporting sharing and collaboration in science.

Being senior and ICT: a study of seniors using ICT in China

System design for seniors often focuses on the decline of their biological capabilities and social connectedness. This approach has been challenged as too simplistic to capture what it really means to be senior. This paper presents a qualitative study of 17 seniors in urban China (age ranging from 50s to 70s), who have adopted and incorporated ICT into their daily lives. Findings from this study show that the ways in which seniors attend to ICT are not simply shaped by changes in health or other wellbeing, but also by their life attitudes, value systems, relationships to younger generations as well as historical specifics during their coming of age. This paper contributes by showing that 1) what it means to be senior is shaped from within a whole social ecology of past and current experiences, values and interactions; 2) senior identities are not fixed, but continuously negotiated, articulated and enacted through ICT; 3) social interaction and access of technologies are highly intertwined.

A partial replication approach for anywhere anytime mobile commenting

Commenting systems play increasingly important roles in the interactive web applications. Meanwhile, more and more web applications are visited on mobile devices. However, the intermittent connection of mobile networks and resource limitation of mobile devices pose great challenges, mainly in terms of interactive responsiveness and data consistency. In this paper, we present the first work of partial replication solution based on collaborative editing techniques, which can address the issues of local responsiveness and resource limitation on mobile commenting systems. We report how we address the consistency maintenance challenges that come with the partial replication approach. With this approach, users are allowed to smoothly comment anywhere anytime. The comment thread can be incrementally updated and automatically synchronized with strong data consistency guarantees. We implemented a system prototype called Hydra and evaluated it on a real data set.

Informing and performing: investigating how mediated sociality becomes visible

In the human–computer interaction, computer supported cooperative work, and ubiquitous computing literature, making people’s presence and activities visible as a design approach has been extensively explored to enhance computer-mediated interactions and collaborations. This process has developed under the rubrics of “awareness,” “social translucence,” “social activity indicators,” “social navigation,” etc. Although the name and details vary, the central ideas are similar. By making social presence and activities more visible or perceivable, they provide social context for members to make sense of situations and guide their activities more informatively and appropriately. In this work, we introduce a class of visualizations called social context displays, which use and share graphical representations to depict people’s presence and activity information with an explicit focus on groups. The aim of this work is to examine social context displays in use and contribute new abstractions for understanding how making social information more visible works in general. Through our first-hand experience with user-centered design and empirical investigations of two social context displays in real settings, we uncovered not only how they provide social context to inform actions and decisions, but also how members perform and manage their self- and group-representations through the display. Drawing on Goffman’s performance framework, we provide a detailed description of how people react and respond to these two social context displays and reconsider some of the broader issues associated with computer-mediated interactions such as privacy, context, and media richness.

The collective infrastructural work of electricity: exploring feedback in a prepaid university dorm in China

Feedback on resource consumption is often explored as a way to raise awareness and saving resources. This paper reports findings from a user study of a feedback system deployed in a Chinese university dormitory with a prepaid electricity system, a context different from the more common domestic setting in the West explored in prior research. With this work, we move beyond resource conservation and draw attention to an often-neglected aspect of infrastructural work -- the work to ensure the smooth and continuous supply of resources from end users. This paper examines the ways in which people attend to electricity through what we term collective infrastructural work, i.e. people perceive electricity as a marginal concern, and yet invest time to maintain it collectively. We draw out a number of implications for design and evaluation from this work.

PWMDS: A system supporting provenance-based matching and discovery of workflows in proteomics data analysis

Provenance plays a fundamental role in e-science to keep track of the data processing execution, evaluate the data quality, reproduce the analysis results, and especially share and re-use workflows. How to take full advantage of provenance to help scientists discover, match and select scientific workflows is a challenging work. Although some studies have been done to model, store, and query scientific workflows, little is done to build practical systems to support workflow matching and discovery. In this paper, we devise and implement a Provenance-Based Workflow Matching and Discovery System (PWMDS) for task-based pipelines in a proteomics data analysis platform called CoPExplorer to address the above challenge. With the proposed novel provenance model and workflow matching & discovery algorithms, PWMDS can provide scientists a ranked list of suitable service candidates for their specified workflows, and initial experiments demonstrate its effectiveness.

Group-based Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Group-LDA)

Most current book recommendation and marketing strategies in online social media are implemented by creating topics or posting advertisements for the brand. They do not precisely target the audiences who are interested in these books, so the recommendation or marketing quality is not guaranteed. In order to solve this problem, we propose an effective audience detection method based on Group-based Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Group-LDA) in order to precisely detect book audiences. Group-LDA is a new probabilistic topic model derived from Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which introduces a new latent concept of group to describe the topic relevance among documents by incorporating book module and book chapter information into the model. Group-LDA is evaluated on Weibo.com with fifty popular books randomly sampled from the reading channel on Douban.com. According to the evaluation results, Group-LDA can effectively detect different types of readers for most categories of books. It outperforms LSA, LDA, author-topic model (ATM) and some other collaborative filtering methods in terms of precision, recall, F1-score and MAP for book audience detection.

Digitality and materiality of new media: online TV watching in china

This paper examines issues of digitality and materiality of new media, grounded in a study of online TV watching in China. Particularly, by looking at how people make choices and decisions regarding TV watching in everyday life, we highlight material and digital properties of new media TV, and how they support and condition actions and interactions around them. The study illustrates that materiality and digitality are complementary, instead of one substituting the other, and are highly intertwined in the hybrid media environment around which meaningful experiences are conditioned and produced. It also suggests that an analytic distinction between materiality and digitality is fruitful in unpacking the complex relations between media technologies and social experiences.