MIT Media Lab

From Fall 2003 to Spring 2005, I was a graduate student / research assistant in the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I worked with Professor Judith Donath.

While I was at the Media Lab, I had the good fortune to undertake a variety of interesting projects:

  • My thesis project, Webbed Footnotes, is on collaborative annotation for the web. I designed a system for annotating web documents and allowing others to provide feedback, promoting interesting or useful contribution. A free, public version will be available eventually.
  • In my poker research I explored how socially important information is transmitted through online interfaces. Poker is especially interesting, because instead of being a collaborative environment (which gets a great deal of attention), it is a competitive one. More information is on my online poker research page.
  • I spent a great deal of time exploring types of participation in electronic communities, especially Usenet and email-based discussion lists, and I am developing a social role-based method of analysis for online communities. My paper from AoIR on social roles sums up this work so far.
  • In Themail (with Fernanda Viegas), we studied the patterns in the conversations that take place in email over time.
  • The Keep-In-Touch Phone - a persuasive mobile phone. My first venture into persuasive computing and into mobile phones.
  • NGDB: The NewsGroup DataBase - a fast, flexible usenet database supporting sociological analysis. Andrew Fiore and I hacked the INN NTTP server software, adding a relational database backend with lots of nice metadata.

    • Classes

  • 15.576 - Research Seminar in Information Technology and Organizations: Social Perspectives (with Wanda Orlikowski)
  • STS 447 - Information Theory: Scientific Visualization (with Joseph Dumit)
  • MAS 965 - Techno-Identity: Signalling Identity in the Real and Virtual Worlds (with Judith Donath)
  • 4.208 - Designing Persuasive Environments and Technologies (with Stephen Intille)
  • MAS 741 - Context-Aware Computing (with Ted Selker)