 | |  | | Ajita Singh
Research Scientist
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| Research | My current research focuses on various aspects of social computing. Global user communities on the web and in geographically distributed enterprises are becoming connected through a proliferation of media and technologies. Web 2.0 technologies have revolutionized the way people connect with each other and the way content is indexed, searched, and shared. These changes present challenges and opportunities for social computing. My work spans topics such as collaborative tagging for inferring user interests/expertise and indexing rich media content such as audio and video, communication dynamics in social networks, inferring interestingness of conversations around media objects such as YouTube videos, and social synchrony in social networks. In the past, I worked at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies in the area of network management. I was an adjunct faculty member at the Stevens Institute of Technology in 2002-2003. My Ph.D. dissertation from the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin focused on the automatic extraction of parallelism from constraint-based specifications.
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| Projects | I am working on a project called Echoes which can be thought of as a Conversation Pensieve (borrowing from J.K.Rowling's device for storing memories) for audio conversations. Users can store, search, browse, and tag audio conversations (of meetings, discussions, presentations etc.). Users are presented with contextualized networks of conversations, users, and tags when they perform searches in Echoes. Under a collaboration with Prof. Hari Sundaram and Munmun De Choudhury at Arizona State University, I have worked on projects to analyze data from social networking websites such as MySpace, Engadget, YouTube, and Digg to infer communication flow, how activity in social networks may be correlated with external events, how social network dynamics can be characterized at individual, group, and community levels, to infer interestingness of conversations around media objects, and to predict social synchrony in online social media. Under a collaboration with Prof. Alfred Kobsa and Sameer Patil at the University of California at Irvine, I conducted a large field study (extensive audio interviews and online surveys) of a software development project distributed across 5 geographic locations including one international location. The goal of the study is to understand the factors that affect privacy concerns in using awareness systems and to assess the relationship between awareness and privacy in loosely-coupled collaborations. |
| Publications | - Social Synchrony: Predicting Mimicry of User Actions in Online Social Media. To appear in the proceedings of The 2009 IEEE International Conference on Social Computing, SocialCom '09, Vancouver, Canada, August 29-31, 2009. (Acceptance rate: 9%), with M. De Choudhury, H. Sundaram, & D. Seligmann.
- Interpersonal Privacy Management in Distributed Collaboration: Situational Characteristics and Interpretive Influences. To appear in The 12th IFIP conference on Human-Computer interaction, INTERACT 2009, Sweden, August 2009, with Sameer Patil, Alfred Kobsa, Lynne S. Brotman, D. Seligmann.
- Connecting Content to Community in Social Media via Image Content, User Tags and User Communication. To appear in the proceedings of The 2009 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo, ICME '09, Cancun, Mexico, June 28- July 3, 2009, with M. De Choudhury, H. Sundaram, & D. Seligmann.
- What Makes Conversations Interesting? Themes, Participants and Consequences of Conversations in Online Social Media. The 18th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), Madrid, April 2009, (Acceptance rate: 11%) with M. De Choudhury, H. Sundaram, & D. Seligmann.
- Visualizing Search Results as Web Conversations. Workshop on Web Search Result Summarization and Presentation, The 18th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), Madrid, April 2009, with S. Kelkar, D. Seligmann.
- Multi-Scale Characterization of Social Network Dynamics in the Blogosphere. Poster, The ACM 17th Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), California, Oct 2008, with M. De Choudhury, H. Sundaram, & D. Seligmann.
- Can Blog Communication Dynamics be Correlated with Stock Market Activity? The Nineteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, Hypertext 08, June, 2008 with M. De Choudhury, H. Sundaram, & D. Seligmann.
- Designing for Persistent Audio Conversations in the Enterprise. The Third Designing for User eXperience Conference (DUX 2007), Nov. 2007, with A. Renduchintala, S. Kelkar, & D. Seligmann.
- Professional Activities: Organized and moderated panel - “The Future of Online Social Interactions: What to Expect in 2020” at the 17th International World Wide Web Conference, Beijing, April 2008, On Board of Editors for Journal of Network and Systems Management 2004-Present, Technical Program Committee member of several recent conferences: WWW 2009 (18th International World Wide Web Conference), Social Networks and Web 2.0 Track,NOMS 20010,2008,2006 (IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium), IM 2009,2007 (The IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management), Guest editor of a special issue of the Journal of Network and Systems Management on Distributed Management in 2004.
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