research
Cultures in The Social Interactions in Organizational CMC
The first large-sclae empirical study of cultural differences in social interactions through CMC tools. Based on 9k volunteer users and more than 20 million records of their email and Instant Messaging conversation, we compared people working in eight different countries in terms of their social network within the organization, preferences for CMC tools, and sentiments expressed in English conversations. We found significant cultural differences not only between the two major cultural groups (West vs. East), but also among countries within each group.
working with: Zhen Wen, Lada A. Adamic, Mark Ackerman
KGB: Analyzing the Answering Agent Community
KGB is a text answer service in the multiple countries. Questions are asked through the Internet or telephone and answered by pre-recruited “answering” agents, who retrieve information from the KGB database or the Internet. Our research goal is to understand how the agents perform this kind of “knowledge generation” work and how they collaborate within the community.
working with: Lada A. Adamic, Mark Ackerman
Activity Lifespan: User Survival Patterns in Online Q&A Communities
Retaining participation is crucial for information services, online knowledge sharing services among them. We present the first comprehensive analysis of users’ activity lifespan across three predominant online knowledge-sharing communities. Extending previous work focusing on initial interactions of new users, we use survival analysis to quantify participation patterns that can be used to predict individual lifespan over the long term and discuss how cross-site differences in user participation and the underlying factors can be related to differences in system design and culture.
working with: Xiao Wei, Mark Ackerman, Lada A. Adamic
Individual Focus and Knowledge Contribution 
Before contributing new knowledge, individuals must attain requisite background knowledge or skills through schooling, training, practice, and experience. Given limited time, individuals often choose either to focus on few areas, where they build deep expertise, or to delve less deeply and distribute their attention and e orts across several areas. We measure the relationship between the narrowness of focus and the quality of contribution across a range of both traditional and recent knowledge sharing media, including scholarly articles, patents, Wikipedia, and online question and answer forums. Across all systems, we observe a small but signi cant positive correlation between focus and quality.
working with: Lada A. Adamic, Xiao Wei, Sean Gerrish, Kevin K Nam, Gavin S. Clarkson
Diffusion Dynamics of Games on Online Social Networks
Social games, being embedded in and drawing upon existing social networks, have the potential to spread virally. We examine two popular social games, each having millions of Facebook users, to understand the role that users play individually and collectively in propagating social applications.
working with: Xiao Wei, Lada A. Adamic, Ricardo Matsumura Araujo
Social Interaction & Information Diffusion on Twitter
We look at social interactions going on Twitter through users' mentioning networks. We assess the degree to which Twitter supports social conversation and the role social network plays in diffusion trending topics. Incorporating survival analysis, we constructed a novel model to capture the three major properties of information diffusion: speed, scale, and range. On the whole, we find that some properties of the tweets themselves predict greater information propagation but that properties of the users, the rate with which a user is mentioned historically in particular, are equal or stronger predictors.
working with: Scott Counts
Witkey: How Real Money Knowledge Market Works?
Witkeys are a thriving type of web-based knowledge sharing market in China, supporting a form of crowdsourcing. In a Witkey site, users offer a small award for a solution to a task, and other
users compete to have their solution selected.
The research on Witkey websites contains 3 studies: using social network method to identify user expertise level and task prestige level; analyzing users' activities and adaptive patterns; and conducting a field experiment to test the market mechanism.