Monthly Archives: January 2018

Different Strokes for Different Folks: The Value of Personality Type in Recommender Systems and Social Computing

By on

Did you know that your personality type can be used to predict your behavior on an online recommender site (how long you stay, what you do, whether and how much you are likely to rate)  and even what to recommend to you? That’s what we found in our latest research using the MovieLens recommender system and the Big Five Personality scale for modeling user personality. To learn more, read on!

(more…)

Take Your Medicine: Write Online!

By on

Decades of research have shown that writing about our deepest, darkest emotions makes us feel better. But what happens when we write about those feelings online?

Patients with life-threatening illnesses must regularly process heavy emotions. Many patients and their caregivers turn to online health communities to get support and share their journeys. We partnered with CaringBridge.org – a large journaling platform that lets patients write about their health journey – to explore how expressive writing affects people’s engagement with their online community.

Haiwei demonstrates posting a journal update on CaringBridge.

(more…)