The Technology and Society Gateway Seminar
HFH 1132
The Fall 2009 offering of the Technology & Society Seminar Series (re)addresses the theme of social computing and its impacts on technology and society, with specific emphasis on the study of online social networks. Social computing, and online social networks have exploded in popularity and growth in the last 2-3 years, with the largest networks counting hundreds of millions of active users as members. The use of these services and applications have dramatically changed the way people interact and communicate. In this version of the Gateway Seminar, we will look at three broad categories of topics:
Technologies and Methods: measurements, data-mining, visualization of evolving online social networks and applications, privacy and anonymity in archiving of social data, prevention of reputation-hacking or reputation aggression, interoperability (including both the Facebook social markup language approach and the Google OpenSocial API approach), and information provenance (or mechanisms for capturing and conveying the origins and processing history of digital information)
Information Credibility and Trust: source authentication in distributed information environments, user perceptions and use of reputation metrics and tools (e.g., ratings of posts on a social bookmarking site), social interaction processes for establishing document trust, comparison of the way trust develops in social computing environments with the historical diffusion of trust in older media environments (e.g., when writing was new and people had difficulty learning to trust documents), and governance structures for online knowledge-production communities
Societal Impact: the influence of social networks on user communication patterns, the use of social networks as authentication mechanisms for applications such as online auctions and distribute data sharing services, the impact of social/collaborative applications on workplace productivity, the changing views of online privacy as impacted by social networking profiles, the use of social networks as educational and organizational tools by both philanthropic and "dark" organizations
As always, in this seminar series, graduate students from all departments are invited. New and previous attendees are equally encouraged to attend.
The content of the seminar is driven by student presentations on their research or topics of interest, followed by round-table discussion. The exact agenda of the seminar will be set by students interests. The seminar typically includes participation by several faculty from diverse backgrounds.
