Distinguished Speaker Series 2011-12

John Riedl Professor, Department of Computer Science University of Minnesota     Community, Cooperation, and Conflict in Wikipedia (slides-PDF, video-mp4) (Note: this is a new title)

March 2, 2012

Friday

3:00 - 4:30

Faculty Host: Prof. Gloria Mark

 

RSVP: Email RSVP required to Joanna Kerner by Monday February 27.

Location: Donald Bren Hall (building #314), room 6011

Cost: No cost to attend.

Directions and parking information are available.

 

Abstract: Social production communities, like Wikipedia, are changing the way the world produces and shares information. However, these communities face important challenges, including attracting new members, socializing those members, keeping them actively participating, and managing conflict between members. Taken together, the effectiveness of a community at meeting these challenges is a measure of its health. Our long-term goal is to develop general measures for community health that can help the designers of any community react early and rapidly to emerging problems. In this talk we will look at a series of studies that evaluate specific aspects of community health, using Wikipedia as an example. We will discuss the signs that Wikipedia is a healthy and successful community -- and also look at some early warning signs of problems in Wikipedia that may need to be addressed soon.

About the Speaker: John Riedl is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota where he has been a faculty member since 1990. In 1992 John co-founded the GroupLens project on recommender systems, and has been co-directing it since. He also co-founded Net Perceptions, the leading recommender systems company during the first Internet boom. GroupLens has been deeply involved in understanding how intelligent user interfaces can help online communities work and play together better.

He has been named Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, and is founding co-editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems journal. He has co-authored Best Paper winners at the IUI, WikiSym (twice), CSCW, and Data Engineering conferences. John has also received the MIT Sloan School Award for Innovation in E-Commerce, the Computer Science teaching award (four times) and the George Taylor Award for Exceptional Contributions to Teaching. Riedl has authored over 100 publications, including one book and many papers.