Projects

This project explores a new approach to analyzing the impacts derived from Federal funding for basic computer and information science research. This work will expand the CSTB charts to showcase the development and evolution of the human capital through which the technological innovations currently depicted arise. It will bring to the foreground the development and value of the human capital, the formation of intellectual communities, and the social ties and networks of relations among scholars that provide a vehicle to inform funding for scholarly development, and amplify the value to the Nation for funding computing research.
The macro-scale interests are the development and evolution of the scientific communities from which technological innovations in computing arise, focusing on the ways in which the development of human capital is shaped by, and shapes, the technological innovations and situated contexts. The detailed micro-scale analysis will be the development of the recently announced Microsoft computing surface. This work provides empirical insights and support for the importance of Federal funding for basic research into computing by highlighting the development of the human capital and intellectual communities that support technological innovation. It also Showcases the forms and levels of technology transfer among industry and academe, and the roles that Federal funding plays in supporting these activities.

When moving from a face to face to a distributed collaborative environment, verbal and nonverbal communication will change.  In this study we compared the nonverbal interactions from two studies on emergency planning with a geo-collaborative tool.  The first study was on a paper prototype in a face-to-face setting and the second study was an analogous experiment on teams working remotely via a geo-collaborative software prototype. We used this comparative research design to explore implications for system design and theory development in computer-supported cooperative work.

New challenges have prompted academic institutions to embark on school-wide electronic curriculum support mechanisms for on-campus functions such as course registration. E-lion registration system, as a typical form of registration system, allows students to select courses offered for the up-coming semester or even for the up-coming academic year. To analyze the usability of this system, the individual student level stratum was chosen as the area to be investigated.  We examined perception of usability, addressing the following question:

• What are the general perceptions of the usability of the e-Lion registration system?
• What is the relationship between training and understanding of the e-Lion registration system?
• Do graduate and undergraduate students have different perceptions of the e-Lion registration?

The qualitative and interpretive study was theoretically informed by the Delone and McLeane information systems success model.

Web search based on people’s names has been always one of the most popular query types.  A recent study reports that around 30% of search engine queries involve some form of people names. However, people names are inherently ambiguous (e.g., about 90,000 distinct names are shared by 100 million people in US). For instance, when one is looking for recent articles of a mathematician “John Doe” from Penn State using Google, returned web pages may include: (1) several web pages of the very mathematician (with slightly different name spellings such as “John Doe”, “J. Doe”, or “Dr. John Arthur Doe”). Such a problem is often known as Web People Name Disambiguation (WPND) problem: i.e., given N web pages returned for a name query X, group N pages into K clusters such that pages within each cluster refer to the same real people while pages across clusters refer to different real people. In this project, the task was to solve the WPND problem using a small test data set from a recent academic competition to solve the WPND problem, called the Web People Search Track (WePS).

Understandings around the role of e-learning need to be accompanied by a realization of the variety of social dimensions in the innovation process. As most studies in this domain are typically context independent, this research, building on structuration theory, seeks to investigate different interpretations and uses of Course Management Systems (CMS) in an academic context. For the purpose of this research, a case study has been conducted on the introduction of a CMS in a higher education institution. Findings from this empirical study have been drawn on to illuminate how this system is employed in disparate manners by different groups of academics, and what are the reasons behind this discrepancy. The study also demonstrates that the practice lens (Orlikowski 2000), viewing the use of technology as a process of enactment, presents a useful insight for explanation and synthesis of  the variations in usage patterns.