Blog

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

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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!

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Take Your Medicine: Write Online!

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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.

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Ramen is More Photogenic than Chicken Wings: A Winter Break Externship Report

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GroupLens externs with some of their favorite foods.

 

Guest written by Maryam Hedayati, Steph Herbers, Sophia Maymudes, and Anna Meyer.

 

Christmas is almost here. Do you know what most people won’t be doing on December 25th? Writing online restaurant reviews. Let’s dive deeper into the world of online restaurant reviews to learn more about this and other interesting trends. (more…)

SqueezeBands: Hugging Through the Screen

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A woman raises her hand towards a webcam during a videochat with a friend. Her hand is encased in a cloth device with shape memory alloy springs.
Lucy and Jackie demonstrate using SqueezeBands to send a high five! The camera detects mutual gestures like this one and creates a sensation of touch by squeezing and heating each person’s hand band.

 

When I Skype with my family, I really wish that I could reach through the screen to give them a hug! Instead, we sometimes have to pretend—we lean forward “hugging” the monitor or bring our hands towards the camera to do a virtual “high five.” What if you could actually feel some of that touch instead of just having to imagine it?

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Your feelings of connecting to a group can predict your future behavior

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Maybe you’ve joined a group recently could be a Taekwondo group, a wine tasting club, a fantasy football league, or whatever. Do you know that how people felt “connected” to a group before they joined can predict their future behavior in the group? Social psychologists have identified two conceptually distinct ways a member can connect with a group — identity-based attachment (e.g., “I feel connected to the Taekwondo group because I started to learn Taekwondo when I was a kid!”) and bonds-based attachment (e.g., “I feel connected to the wine tasting club because my best friend Daniel is a club member!”) — and worked to understand their causes and consequences. What we have done is study how connections between a person and an online group can predict that person’s future behavior.

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