Yasuaki Sakamoto, Ph.D. - US grants

The Internet makes possible a different kind of design, based on a new phenomenon: crowdsourcing creativity, where many individuals perform small design tasks for fun, nominal compensation, or both. What if the iterative application of a crowd's energy is used to generate, combine and refine ideas and possible solutions to social and technical problems? If the sequential application of crowdsourcing to idea generation works well, then many difficult design challenges might be addressed. If crowdsourcing has limits, then finding these limits will provide a more focused path for the growth of peer production. During the course of this project, participants, drawn from the general public, will generate initial ideas, then combine the many different ideas of their peers, seeking to solve difficult and open-ended design problem through a large scale process of combination, evaluation, selection, and combination again, cycling through these steps until a solution is converged upon.

The Intellectual Merit of this research lies in the design and results of experiments that study crowdsourcing in the idea discovery process. The Broader Impact of this research lies in its potential harnessing of human intellectual power to attack challenging problems whose solution will affect every one of us. The project is potentially transformative, in that the crowdsourcing of important problems might accelerate by orders of magnitude our progress on pressing social and technological issues.

This project focuses on understanding the spread of false information during responses to natural disasters and on the development of new techniques to prevent the spread of false information in social media. For example, after the March 11, 2011 major earthquake in Japan, social media such as Twitter played an important role in sharing information and coordinating disaster response. However, social media were also used by some people to spread false information about radiation and supplies, potentially creating widespread panic. The goals of this project are to better understand how false information is spread via Twitter after an emergency and to develop and evaluate new techniques to prevent the spread of false information. To achieve these goals, the investigators will build a visualization tool to measure the effectiveness of counteracting tweets that question the accuracy of false tweets and conduct experiments with university students in Japan and USA in which subjects' familiarity with and likelihood of spreading different types of false and counteracting tweets are measured.

Intellectual Merit: The project will provide new insights into the factors that determine the spread of false information, as well a set of recommendations for reducing this spread. The project will also contribute new methods for analyzing the spread of information in social media.

Broader Impacts: The insights and tools provided by the project will benefit future disaster response efforts by allowing emergency personnel to detect when false information is being spread and intervene to counteract the effects of false information before negative societal effects such as panic occur.

This project will result in a novel system called SOCRATES that will help transform social media research for scholars working in diverse fields by building a community of researchers and practitioners around various issues of data-intensive research. Social media services such as Twitter and Facebook, used by millions of people worldwide, expose vast amounts of data about people's beliefs, ideas, opinions, behaviors, and activities. At the same time, the sheer scale and volume of the data make them extremely difficult for scholars to study effectively. SOCRATES will address this issue by incorporating a set of socio-computational tools that will allow researchers from multiple fields to collect large-scale social media data; explore and visualize the resulting content items, and analyze the collected content. A community- and human-centered approach to developing the new system will ensure that SOCRATES matches researchers' work practices and mental models, is easy to use, and produces outcomes that significantly contribute to the researchers' goals, especially in solving multi-disciplinary problems. Importantly, the SOCRATES system will employ a social-computational approach--crowdsourcing--to handle some of the challenges of social media research. Thus, the project will take advantage of the intelligence of both computers and people to study online social activities. SOCRATES proposes to use the labor of humans to assist in the collection of data (e.g., by refining and filtering information collected by an automatic crawler); to help explore the data and generate insights (e.g., by allowing the public to view and comment on visualizations of the collected data); and to analyze and annotate the data (e.g., by creating a controlled environment where coders can annotate content items with high reliability). As a result, SOCRATES will provide a first-of-its-kind, end-to-end environment where social media can be studied effectively, with high validity, and at immense scale.

As the Internet grows in importance, it is vital to develop methods and techniques for educating end-users to improve their awareness of online privacy. However, the development of Web-based education tools for online privacy is still in the early stage. Traditional solutions involving professionals can make the tool development costly. It is also not clear how motivating, inspiring, and/or effective these education tools are to general users, especially novice users who have rarely dealt with privacy issues.

Through interdisciplinary research between a computer scientist and two social scientists, this project aims to exploit both group-sourcing and crowdsourcing approaches to develop effective education tools for online privacy. Research activities include: (1) designing novel methods to generate collective wisdom from non-expert user groups for the development of innovative ideas of privacy education tools; (2) investigating the main characteristics of a wise group that is capable of developing creative and high-quality ideas for privacy training; (3) developing methods to enhance the originality and practicality of the ideas generated by the non-expert groups; and (4) integrating group-sourcing, crowdsourcing, and experts' opinions to evaluate the effectiveness of the developed privacy training tools.

This interdisciplinary, high-risk, high-payoff project will dramatically advance research in security/privacy and social science. The research results will be disseminated broadly through curricular materials appropriate for computer science, College of Arts and Letters, and MBA students.