1999 — 2003 |
Palen, Leysia |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Local and Global Electronic Calendaring @ University of Colorado At Boulder
This research project proposes to study the use of groupware calendar systems within a number of organizations that have widely adopted them. Because local calendaring practices vary from site to site, the result is a variety of calendar cultures that afford different coordination behaviors within these organizations. In addition, the imminent availability of open standards created by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in support of calendar application interoperability means that calendars can more easily be shared across organizational boundaries (i.e., between businesses, public institutions and homes.) Thus, there are new opportunities for the use of shared groupware calendars across organizations (i.e., "global calendaring" practices). The PI will examine the IETF-Calsh standards design and their potential impacts on calendaring use and technology adoption across businesses as well as in home environments, with special attention to the practices and impacts of merging professional and personal calendars. This research will advance our understanding of collective time management practices within and across organizations, as well as between home and work.
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0.915 |
2006 — 2012 |
Palen, Leysia |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Career: Data in Disaster: Socio-Technical Change in Response Agency & Public Communications @ University of Colorado At Boulder
This project will conduct interdisciplinary, socio-technical research and education that address the current and potential uses of information technology in disaster contexts. The research will examine how data generation and sharing activities by response agencies and the public place new demands on information dissemination processes between these two entities. The research design includes field studies of citizen-generated textual, visual, and digital communications, and of the incident intelligence and public information officer functions in natural hazards events such as wildfires and hurricanes. Results will be in the form of ethnographically-informed models of interaction, data-generation and data-sharing activity that in turn will be put in organizational and institutional context to formulate recommendations for innovators, emergency response practitioners and policy makers engaged in emergency response reform.
Attention to disaster warning, response and recovery is high and widespread, coming from the federal government, national agencies, the private sector and academia. Technological innovation and emergency response reform mean that the relationships between the public and response agencies are becoming more complex. People are natural information seekers and, in uncertain situations like disaster, will persist in integrating information from formal and informal sources to make sense of it. Increased access to camera phones, phone text and picture messaging, and personal Global Positioning System technology means that the communications the public naturally engages in following a disaster produce data that can be appropriated into the response effort. The challenge lies in how this new data pathway could and should be incorporated into response agency activity. For agencies, the rise of GPS capability coupled with geographic information systems is changing the kind and amount of data that incident intelligence can produce not only for incident command but also for an increasingly tech-knowledgeable public. Through these activities, the very interface between agencies and the public is changing. The older, completely linear model of authorities-to-public affairs-to-news media is outmoded and is being replaced by a much more complex model of information dissemination. How can the interface between response agencies and the public better organize and encourage two-way communication and participation?
An important educational goal of this project is to develop future practitioners and researchers who appreciate the complexities of designing policy, processes, and technologies for the highly dynamic situations of disaster. The success of the research relies on a vertically integrated education and training program that includes practitioner and other subject matter expert involvement and a partnership with the Natural Hazards Center. It leverages research to produce a database of modules for use in courses and outreach activities where either domain,methodological or theoretical instruction is needed. Partnership with the National Center for Women and Information Technology is intended to increase the participation of women in the future science and engineering workforce by using examples from this research to illustrate the changing face of information technology careers. The research, education, and results dissemination efforts are built on interdisciplinary partnerships with government agencies and academic institutions, and will launch activities that join fields of research and practice. Results will be disseminated to developers, practitioners, and policy makers in ways that are useful to them.
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0.915 |
2009 — 2015 |
Martin, James (co-PI) [⬀] Anderson, Kenneth (co-PI) [⬀] Palen, Leysia Sicker, Douglas (co-PI) [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Hcc: Large: Collaborative Research: Widescale Computer-Mediated Communication in Crisis Response: Roles, Trust & Accuracy in the Social Distribution of Information @ University of Colorado At Boulder
Information and communication technology (ICT) promises to help reduce impacts of large-scale disruptions from natural hazards, pandemics, and terrorist threat. This research focuses on a critical aspect of large-scale emergency response -- the needs and roles of members of the public. By viewing the citizenry as a powerful, self-organizing, and collectively intelligent force, ICT can play a transformational role in crisis situations. This view of a civil society augmented by ICT is based on socio-behavioral knowledge about how people behave in crisis, rather than on simplified and mythical portrayals. With a critical reframing of emergency response as a socially-distributed information system, the project aims to leverage the knowledge of members of the public through reuse of publicly available computer mediated communications (CMCs) (e.g., community, mapping, and social networking sites; blogs; Twitter). The project will study and integrate that heterogeneous information and -- with techniques of information extraction through natural language processing as well as trust and reputation modeling -- add meta-information to help users assess context, validity, source, credibility, and timeliness to make the best decisions for their highly localized, changing conditions.
The results of this research addresses matters of policy, practice and technological innovation, responding directly to needs identified in national policy statements, including Grand Challenge #1 of the National Science and Technology Council's Subcommittee on Disaster Reduction, which calls for the provision of "hazard and disaster information where and when it is needed" (SDR, 2005). At-risk populations are disproportionately affected by crises; the results of this research could mitigate the impacts on these communities. The research is also inclusive of people across different cultures/ethnic groups within the U.S. and from different countries. The project broadens the future STEM workforce, since socio-technical and practical orientations to computational research attract women to study STEM disciplines. The research contributions include cyberinfrastructure-aware applications, techniques, and services built from empirical knowledge of the social structures that produce crisis data.
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0.915 |
2011 — 2012 |
Palen, Leysia |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Workshop: 2012 Computer Supported Cooperative Work Doctoral Consortium @ University of Colorado At Boulder
This is funding to support next year's CSCW doctoral research consortium (workshop) of approximately 14 promising doctoral students from the United States and abroad, along with 6 distinguished research faculty. The event will take place in conjunction with the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in Bellevue, Washington on February 11-15, 2012, and sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Human Computer Interaction (SIGCHI). The CSCW conferences are a premier venue for the presentation of research relating to the design and use of technologies that affect groups, organizations, and communities, and are attended by approximately 500 professionals from around the world. The development and application of new technologies continues to enable new ways of working together and coordinating activities. Although work is an important area of focus for the conference, technology is increasingly supporting a wide range of recreational and social activities. CSCW has also embraced an increasing range of devices, as we collaborate from different contexts and situations. The conference brings together top researchers and practitioners from academia and industry who are interested in both the technical and social aspects of collaboration. CSCW 2012 will be the 24th conference in the series. Research reports published in the CSCW Conference Proceedings are heavily refereed and widely cited. More information about the conference may be found at http://www.cscw2012.org.
The Doctoral Colloquium at CSCW 2012 will take place on Saturday, February 11 and Sunday, February 12, with follow-up activities (including poster sessions) during the conference's main technical program. Goals of the doctoral consortium include building a cohort group of new researchers who will then have a network of colleagues spread out across the world, guiding the work of new researchers by having experts in the research field mentor them and provide constructive advice, and making it possible for promising new entrants to the field to attend their research conference. Student participants, who are chosen by a review committee based on materials submitted by applicants in response to the CSCW Call for Participation, will make formal presentations of their work during the workshop, and will receive feedback from the faculty panel. The feedback is geared to helping students understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to other CSCW research, whether their topics are adequately focused for thesis research projects, whether their methods are correctly chosen and applied, and whether their results are appropriately analyzed and presented. Extended abstracts of the students' presentations will be published in the CSCW supplemental proceedings, which are distributed to all attendees. The organizing committee will take proactive steps to ensure and increase participation from institutions and ethnic groups that have been traditionally underrepresented at CSCW.
Broader Impacts: The CSCW doctoral consortia, which began in 1992, have been highly successful in providing a forum for the initial socialization into the field of young doctoral scholars, and many of today?s leading CSCW researchers participated as students in earlier consortia. These doctoral consortia traditionally bring together the best of the next generation of CSCW researchers, allowing them both to sharpen the research skills and to create a social network among themselves and with senior researchers at a critical stage in their professional development. Maintaining and fostering research dialog among the diverse disciplines that are present in the CSCW community results in synergistic and transformative research collaborations. Because the students and faculty constitute a diverse group across a variety of dimensions, including nationality/cultural and scientific discipline, the students' horizons are broadened to the future benefit of the field.
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0.915 |
2014 — 2016 |
Sprain, Leah Liel, Abbie [⬀] Goldstein, Bruce Palen, Leysia Dashti, Shideh (co-PI) [⬀] Javernick-Will, Amy (co-PI) [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Rips Type 1: the Interdependence of Built, Social and Information Infrastructures For Community Resilience: a Participatory Process @ University of Colorado At Boulder
This project supports foundational research that explores and creates collaborative processes to foster community resilience. Current approaches that characterize resilience are engineering-based and predict possible infrastructure damage in the face of acute and/or chronic stressors. When resilience is more broadly reframed as the interdependence between the built, social, and information infrastructures, engineering and statistical models of infrastructure damage benefit from an adaptive and participatory approach that is effective, inclusive, and fair. It is hypothesized that participatory processes of model-building lead to community ownership, social learning, and capacity building, all of which contribute to resilience. Within the one-year time frame of this study, a framework is developed using the case study of 2013 flooding events in Boulder, Colorado. The Boulder case is used to explore and test the modeling and participatory processes, to generate a new understanding that can be transferred to other communities. The project provides a platform for team-building and formalized collaboration of cross-disciplinary expertise, while training a cohort of scholars, students and practitioners, who can bridge across disciplines and between research and practice to create usable science and models to foster resilience.
This research develops the conceptual framework and methodological approaches to marry physical and participatory processes for designing, modeling, and evaluating resilient communities. The study explores and test innovative, inclusive, and adaptive processes through which community stakeholders engage in and contribute to model development. At the same time, advanced predictive engineering-based models of interdependent built infrastructures are developed and piloted by the team. In-situ and participatory empirical research and design, combined with new forms of digital participation, generate a new understanding of inclusive development and delivery of predictive models. The novel integration of physically-grounded model development with participatory action research that engages stakeholders helps the development of predictive models of interdependent infrastructures in a larger, more realistic, and inclusive context.
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0.915 |
2015 — 2018 |
Anderson, Kenneth (co-PI) [⬀] Palen, Leysia |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Chs: Small: the Future of Geospatial Data: the Analytics and Implications of Open Source Mapping @ University of Colorado At Boulder
This project will produce methods and tools in the critical area of geospatial data that both the larger computer science research community can use as well as the public-sector and private-sector development communities. Geospatial data are a critical area of research and development, notably in supporting rapid response to disasters arising from natural or technological hazards, as well as other sudden crises. This research will deeply investigate the conditions under which volunteer-generated data in "open source mapping" environments are generated and used. The tools developed in this project will help further validate volunteer-generated open geospatial data, and enable appropriate use through better analytical inspection methods. In addition, the connections between social computing activities and impacts on the world will be substantiated in clear ways, especially through the windows of humanitarian events and societal resilience-building. How open mapping can be made more viable for social problems will also be advanced through this research.
To achieve these goals, the team will design, develop, deploy, and evaluate a software infrastructure and its associated application programming interface that operates on large historical files of OpenStreetMap data. OpenStreetMap is a 2+ million member, decade-old volunteer-based organization that has created a "open data" based digital map of the world. This research will allow examination of the interpersonal, group, and organizational means by which collaborative cartography is accomplished through social computing. It will then examine the implications of having open geospatial data available to humanitarian efforts, which are important drivers to socio-technical change, including that of disaster response, resilience-building of critical infrastructure, and other governmental responsibilities. The research combines computational and behavioral analytics to address critical questions at multiple levels of analysis, from database instantiation to institutional use.
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0.915 |
2016 — 2020 |
Boyd-Graber, Jordan (co-PI) [⬀] Anderson, Kenneth [⬀] Palen, Leysia |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Chs: Medium: Hyperlocal and Hypertemporal Information in Mass Emergencies Events: Next Generation Crisis Informatics Data Collection and Analytics @ University of Colorado At Boulder
This project will advance the empirical study of crisis informatics by moving the extensive analytics developed for post processing of social media-based crisis information to the point of data collection to create a set of intelligent data collection techniques. Crisis informatics is a multidisciplinary field combining human-computer interaction and social computing; its central tenet is that people use personal information and communication technology to respond to disaster in creative ways to cope with uncertainty. This research will reveal how people respond in disasters, both collectively and individually, by examining their digital traces. This will help create better emergency management practice and policy. The research will also advance the delivery of the information people need in disasters by leveraging the vast social media data sets that are produced during them. The safety of people and provision of emergency care as a function of improved situational awareness are the direct benefits of conducting this research.
Past research shows that people local to an event seek and provide information online to help themselves and each other, and that this information is highly localized and temporalized when compared to the global conversation that otherwise arises. Current techniques to derive useful information from the social media stream are limited because they usually cannot scale to the vast growth in social media production; they are often restricted to examining only the language of social media posts and not their metadata; and social media are often collected in ways that prohibit the kinds of analyses that are needed for deep exploration and re-use of the data. This research relies on the body of work that the investigators have empirically conducted on the nature of social media behavior in disasters, and incorporates those rigorous deductive and inductive analytical methods at the point of data collection of the social media streams. This will enable intelligent data collection that can perform real-time analysis that bore in on the hypertemporal and hyperlocal features of information communicated via social media. With agility and rigor, solutions developed in this research will be able to pursue multiple threads of emergent concern that will spawn multiple simultaneous data collection trajectories. This will better enable real-time analysis and visualization of what is happening in the social media record during disaster events as they unfold.
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0.915 |
2021 |
Palen, Leysia |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Rapid: the Rise and Propagation of Anti-Vax and Anti-Access Social Media Campaigns Targeted At Disadvantaged and Minority Populations During the Covid19 Pandemic @ University of Colorado At Boulder
As long as there have been vaccines, there has been vaccine hesitancy. When vaccine hesitancy leads to lowered vaccination rates, there is a greater risk for preventable illness in communities. Increasingly, vaccination has become a target for misinformation and disinformation offline and online. Some disinformation purveyors particularly target disadvantaged and minority populations, which for historical reasons may distrust the public health establishment and medical research. Among these groups, distrust in the healthcare system is often accompanied by multiple barriers to healthcare and a heightened susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection. The research team is conducting quick-response research to better understand the social media mechanisms that threaten COVID-19 vaccination compliance and disinformation targeted at minority and disadvantaged groups. This project explores how anti-vaccine campaigns arise and how they use language and narratives to incite fear of vaccination and rejection of public health messages. An ultimate goal of the project is to further equity in citizen knowledge and public health.
The primary sites of investigation are social media interactions on Twitter, with supplemental fieldwork in geographical communities. Social media studies will include both quantitative and qualitative analysis methods. Data sets will be created that capture unique terms (commercial vaccine names, those that signal groups targeted for anti-vaccine narratives (e.g., “tuskegee”), those using terms that signal vaccine resistance but are noisier (e.g., “gene therapy”), and those capturing phrases such as (“do your own research”). Retrospective searches are intended to detect the genesis of new anti-vaccine narratives. Finally, supplemental fieldwork using semi-structured interviews conducted in West Dallas investigates if and how online anti-vaccine narratives targeted at Black and Latinx groups appear in geographical space. Students will be involved at all stages of the research.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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0.915 |