Newswise — Cornell Computing and Information Science (CIS) announced today that a cross-disciplinary group of ten Cornell University faculty has received $800,000 from Google Inc. to examine how social network phenomena affect large-scale information systems and how such systems can be transformed to provide more meaningful experiences for on-line users.
The Cornell research team includes faculty from the departments of computer science, communication, economics, information science, and sociology who have worked together collaboratively for more than five years on large joint grant projects at the interface of computer science, social science and economics. The group recently founded the Center for the Interface of Networks, Computation and Economics (CINCE) to facilitate cross-campus collaboration on research involving social and economic aspects of complex interconnected systems, including computing applications.
“While social principles underpin many aspects of the on-line experience, we are still a long way from deeply understanding how such systems operate and how our design choices affect the performance of these systems,” said Jon Kleinberg, Cornell professor of computer science and the lead author of the Cornell team’s proposal explaining the objective of the research. “This research will help us leverage the wealth of data now available to bring our understanding of social networks to a new level, as well as enable collaborations with Google researchers that can lead to richer on-line social applications.”
According to the Cornell researchers, as on-line social interactions have surged, the development of tools and mechanisms that mimic the richness of off-line human relationships and the social conventions that regulate and incentivize human behavior have lagged. This has led to a range of well-known challenges in managing on-line interaction, including the proliferation of misinformation and the difficulty in guiding on-line discussion toward productive discourse and away from conflict and polarization. The team’s research, therefore, will focus on three primary areas: managing social links to improve the richness of users’ social interactions, monitoring and enhancing the health of on-line communities in order to encourage beneficial interactions, and developing incentives for on-line communities to develop high-quality information resources.
The mission of CIS is to integrate computing and information science—its ideas, technology and modes of thought — into every academic field at Cornell.In addition to Jon Kleinberg (computer science), faculty on the Cornell team receiving the Google Focused Research Award include, Larry Blume (economics), Dan Cosley (information science), David Easley (economics), Geri Gay (communication), Dan Huttenlocher (computer science), Robert Kleinberg (computer science), Lillian Lee (computer science), Michael Macy (sociology) and Éva Tardos (computer science).
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