Higher Fidelity Systems for Online Discussion
My group develops systems to help people manage information and share it with others. We study both text (online discussion tools) and structured data (information visualization and management applications). Our guiding principle is that humans are powerful and creative information managers, and that the key challenge is to build systems that can accurately store and present the sophisticated thinking that people apply to their information.
In this talk I’ll take a rapid tour through several of our online discussion projects, emphasizing this common solution principle. I’ll discuss NB (http://nb.mit.edu), an online education tool for discussing course content in the margins, Murmur (http://murmur.csail.mit.edu), a system that modernizes the mailing list to address its drawbacks while preserving its great utility, Squadbox, a tool that scaffolds workflows to help protect targets of online harassment, and Wikum (http://wikum.csail.mit.edu), a system that bridges between discussion forums and wikis by helping forum participants work together to build a summary of a long discussion’s main points and conclusions.
Speaker Details
David R. Karger is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. David earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1994 and has since contributed to many areas of computer science, publishing in algorithms, machine learning, information retrieval, personal information management, networking, peer to peer systems, databases, coding theory, and human-computer interaction.
A general interest has been to make it easier for people to create, find, organize, manipulate, and share information. He formed and leads the Haystack group to investigate these issues.
- Date:
- Speakers:
- David Karger
- Affiliation:
- MIT
