Human Kindness in the Face of Adversity, mediaX Thought Leader and Writer of Contagion Shares His Thoughts
In the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak, Scott Z Burns was interviewed by the Washington Post to discuss the parallels between the movie he wrote and the current global pandemic.
Where are the Breakdowns? Surveying Unsuccessful and Failed Uses of Data
From The Theme POTENTIAL, PERFORMANCE AND PRODUCTIVITY WHAT IF What if we could better understand best practices for data analytics? WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO We set out to illuminate the processes and practices through which individuals from diverse professional backgrounds enact data analytics. Specifically, we conducted an organizational field study to investigate how […]
Trust, Reputation, and Anonymity in Peer to Peer Publishing and Content
From The Theme ONLINE MEDIA CONTENT WHAT IF What if we could develop a truly fair, comprehensive and anonymous mechanism for assigning reputation ratings to self-published work online? WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO We set out to explore reputation systems, with a focus on the feasibility of algorithmic techniques that address the issues of […]
Designing Technologies that Mediate Human Social Interaction: Strategies for Effective Cooperation and Collaboration
From The Theme KNOWLEDGE WORKER PRODUCTIVITY WHAT IF What if we could develop a theory of “social affordances” (properties of technologies that shape online social interaction, personal judgment, and social decision-making) to better understand and even predict the effects of media design choices on behavior? WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO We set out to […]
EteRNA: Accelerating Knowledge Creation for RNA Bioengineering through Internet-Scale Gaming
From The Theme KNOWLEDGE WORKER PRODUCTIVITY WHAT IF What if technical contributions from citizen scientists could be crowd sourced to accelerate scientific research? WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO With the EteRNA project, we aimed to rapidly advance RNA (ribonucleic acid) bioengineering, and overcome the limits of the traditional “trial and error” design cycle within […]
Transparent Social Footprints
From The Theme PUBLISH ON DEMAND WHAT IF What if we could help media companies increase revenue by tracking the “social footprints” of their audiences? WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO We wanted to examine the requirements needed to develop prototypes for metrics and tools to support media organizations in the shift from print to […]
TweakCorps: Re-targeting Existing Webpages for Diverse Devices and Users
From The Theme PUBLISH ON DEMAND WHAT IF What if there were a machine learning algorithm that could identify and label design elements of web pages? WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO We focused on one popular class of semantic identifiers – those concerned with the structure (information architecture) of a page. Across webpages, there […]
Recasting the Textbook
From The Theme PUBLISH ON DEMAND WHAT IF What if active engagement in building stories of history helped students evaluate the sources of information and better understand the perspectives from which history is written? WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO We recast the history textbook as an edited on- demand, collaborative collection of historical narratives. […]
Content on the Go: The Economics of the Market for Mobile Apps
From The Theme PUBLISH ON DEMAND WHAT IF What if there were a better way to price apps than pricing based on either raising revenue or raising visibility? WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO We studied app pricing decisions in a stylized model to ascertain the relationship between pricing decisions and market visibility. We took […]