Eric P. S. Baumer

I study and design interactions with algorithms in social computing systems. Fully understanding the individual and societal experiences around algorithmic systems requires close attention to the technical details of their design and implementation. Similarly, any responsible design of such technologies must account for their broader human and social dimensions.

To do so, my work integrates computational techniques from natural language processing and machine learning, conceptual orientations from qualitative and interpretivist social science, and design-based methods for human-centered research. This interdisciplinary synthesis contributes concepts and tools that are essential for understanding, and for creating, the future of sociotechnical systems.

A Hat Trick at GROUP

Posted on November 26, 2017 by epsb

I recently had three submissions accepted to the ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP). The first was a paper to which I contributed about online policy discussion, specifically in the context of MTurk. Among other things, this paper offers some nice empirical evidence about the importance of considering opinions with finer grained distinctions than agree vs. disagree. Second is a paper analyzing how different types of regretful experiences on Facebook can lead to different types of non-use. The main take away is that it matters less who feels the regret than who takes the action that ends up being regretted. Third is a curated collection of short design fiction pieces written by students in the class I taught this past spring. It demonstrates the efficacy of design fiction for thinking through ethical issues in computing.

Eric P. S. Baumer

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A Hat Trick at GROUP