The Road Ahead: Looking Forward to Putting the Lessons of the Past Year to Work

Message from the Director Jennifer Earl

Unbelievably, it has been a full year since I took over as Director of CITS. The time has flown by, with many new projects initiated, new friends and new associates made, and countless lessons learned. So, I thought I would start off this year’s newsletter with some thoughts about what has changed in the last year and what you might expect to see over the following year.

First, in terms of research, CITS has brought together an interdisciplinary group of faculty with common interests in information security, privacy, and credibility. Topics of conversation have included issues such as how users decide whether information is credible on a website (Should you trust that wikipedia article or not?), how trust is established between online users involved in interactions (Should you trust the person you are talking to in Second Life, and if so, with what should you trust them?), how peer-to-peer networks could be improved by understanding more about system and human credibility, etc. While conversations are still early in this group, I am optimistic that over the next year or so, these discussions will evolve into one or more new research projects.

We have also formed an IGERT working group in partnership with Transliteracies, which is a UC-funded research project on online reading run by Alan Liu from the UCSB English Department. IGERTs are NSF-funded projects that both conduct research and provide extensive support for interdisciplinary graduate education. The working group is developing an IGERT proposal on various aspects of social computing and we hope to submit a proposal for funding in 2008.

CITS has also pulled together a group of faculty, graduate students, and staff information systems administrators to work toward the creation of an open source research toolkit lab. The animating vision of the project is that open source scripts and software are created regularly in research projects associated with CITS and beyond. My own NSF project, for instance, has created a range of Perl scripts that are potentially useful to other social science research projects. If there were a repository for those open source scripts, subsequent research projects could benefit without having to reinvent them. Beyond serving as a home for scripts, and providing version control for revised scripts, a true toolkit lab would also work to develop new scripts and software and to extend the research utility of donated scripts.

In addition to sowing the seeds for new research engagements in the future, we continue our commitment to excellence in our existing research engagements. My own NSF CAREER Award continues to move forward, and in doing so, is demonstrating the power of interdisciplinary thinking. For instance, this summer, I hired a Computer Science graduate student, Veljko Pejovic (profiled on the front page of the newsletter), to write several Perl scripts for my project. In addition to writing some excellent scripts, I benefited immensely from our interactions and re-envisioning the problems I was working to resolve through his different disciplinary eyes. I hope he gained a deeper appreciation of what is involved in some kinds of social science research and how his skills can fit within social science research.

Where our educational efforts are concerned, the Ph.D. emphasis has expanded to include Film and Media Studies, and we expect to add other departments in the coming year. We have also improved our system for identifying relevant classes and notifying students about those classes. Our goal is to allow students in the emphasis to more quickly complete the course requirements associated with the emphasis.
In terms of outreach, the biggest news is the expanded access to the CITS collection of video lectures and presentations, as the newsletter article, “CITS Releases Video and Podcast Archive Via Blip.tv”, discusses. So far, over 3000 people have watched a video on our blip.tv space, and we anticipate using videos over the coming year to introduce you to new faculty and to help people get to know existing faculty even better.

The CITS website has also changed and will change again in 2008. We have added a site-wide RSS feed so that people can keep up with us more easily and we have updated the design of the site so that users can find content more easily. The design also highlights our core commitments as a Center more strongly. We are hard at work on a much larger re-design of CITS’s web presence, which will involve migrating our site to a Drupal-based content management system. We expect to launch that new design with its enhanced set of features in 2008.