The closing keynote at WikiSym 2011 will be delivered by Dr. Ed Chi, a staff research scientist at Google and a well-known figure in the HCI community, with over 80 research publications.

Model-Driven Research in Social Computing

Research in Augmented Social Cognition is aimed at enhancing the ability of a group of people to remember, think, and reason. Our approach to creating this augmentation or enhancement is primarily model-driven. Our system developments are informed by models such as information scent, sensemaking, information theory, probabilistic models, and more recently, evolutionary dynamic models. These models have been used to understand a wide variety of user behaviors, from individuals interacting with social bookmark search in Delicious and MrTaggy.com to groups of people working on articles in Wikipedia. These models range in complexity from a simple set of assumptions to complex equations describing human and group behaviors.

By studying online social systems such as Google Plus, Twitter, Delicious, and Wikipedia, we further our understanding of how knowledge is constructed in a social context. In this talk, I will illustrate how a model-driven approach could help illuminate the path forward for research in social computing and community knowledge building.

We’ll be posting similar previews of the other two keynotes shortly.

Note: Dr. Chi replaces Bernardo Huberman in the closing keynote slot.