Mark S. Ackerman

Mark S. Ackerman

Associate Professor

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
and
School of Information

University of Michigan

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The SocialWorlds Research Group

Brief research overview (right, on this page)
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For students

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Resources

My organizational memory bibliography
My expertise finding bibliography

Personal

My vita (updated 10/07)

Research Areas - Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Collaborative Technologies, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Information Access, Sociology of Information, Social Analysis of Computing Systems.

Particular Topics - Information Access, Organizational Memory, Privacy, Virtual Communities, Social Computing.

Overview - The SocialWorlds research group conducts research in three major areas:

Information access.   Information use within organizations or groups has a social dimension to it. We've largely examined organization memory (collective memory, knowledge management).
Privacy.   This is the flip-side of information use, and privacy has an obvious social dimension. (If no one else wants to know, there's no privacy problem.) The usability of privacy enhancing technologies also has a social dimension.
Virtual communities (aka social computing).   Online communities are about social interaction, no matter what flavor of online community being discussed. We've study a range of online systems from bulletin boards to game systems to chat.

The theoretical focus of my research group's work is on considering the interplay of the social world with computational systems. I'm interested in co-design spaces - places where you need to consider how to incorporate elements of the social world within software systems (such as with computer-supported cooperative work systems) and also consider how systems will affect their social settings in return. In some cases, such as privacy, both have to be designed or at least considered simultaneously. This kind of research requires a dual emphasis on both the technology and the social structures of its use.

The above three research areas have varying levels of interplay between social structures and technical systems. In virtual communities, the social world constructed is everything. In collaborative information access, they are the conditions for effective use. Privacy is between.

Our practical focus is on building usable systems to help people with their privacy; to help groups better manage and access their information, and to create communities. We also study how our systems affect the people that use them.

See the SocialWorlds research group's pages for more info on each research stream.

I've been fortunate to work with some really great students.

At Michigan, my group includes Jun Zhang, Kevin Nam, Jina Huh, and Xiaomu Zhou. I am also working with Rob Douglas.

Alumni include: Jack Muramatsu, Wayne Lutters, Dave McDonald, Stephen Cotterill, Dan Mihalik, Anne Swenson, Brian Starr, Andy Tipple, Keri Carpenter, Winnie Hui, and Jeff Dorsz.

Current projects include:

Privacy. I am now considering privacy as a co-design space problem. My attention has shifted from privacy critics (agents to support users with privacy problems) and the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) protocol for the Web. Lately, I've been concentrating on privacy in ubiquitious environments. For several years, I was working on collaborative technologies and privacy in pervasive environments as part of MIT's Project Oxygen.
Organizational memory or collaborative information access. The research stream that begun with Answer Garden project continues along. Take the link to the publications page to find papers on the many systems that my research group has created: Answer Garden, Answer Garden Substrate, Answer Garden 2, the Cafe ConstructionKit, the Do-I-Care Agent, the Expertise Recommender, and now iDiag. Or take the link to the organizational memory page for a definition.

Collective information reuse. This project is attempting to develop a social-theoretical framework to analyze memory resources in collectivities such as organizations, using data from a field study of hotlines (with Christine Halverson).
Online communities. This includes chat systems, MUDs, bulletin board systems, and yes, even the Web. Currently, Jack Muramatsu is continuing his investigation of a game MUD, primarily in terms of social regulation and management. We have a new project, iDiag, to think about distilling knowledge from community brainstorming.
There are probably a few other projects I'm forgetting....

To reach me, send mail to ackerm at umich dot edu

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