Publications

As the modal sources of data in education have shifted over the past few decades, so too have the modeling paradigms applied to these data. In this paper, we overview the principle foci of modeling in the areas of standardized testing, computer tutoring, and online courses from whence these big data have come, and provide a rationale for their adoption in each context. As these data become…

We present a set of design fiction proposals related to sensing and tracking technologies, inspired by the 2013 science fiction novel The Circle. By creating design proposals that explore connections between the novel's imagined world and our present and future realities, we show that we are able to explore, expand, and articulate a range of social, technical, and legal configurations…

The role of emotion in social media has been the subject of considerable research and media attention. But while stereotypes about the emotional profile of status updates — that they are overly-positive, or overly-angry — have solidified, evidence remains circumstantial and indirect. Further, although researchers have made numerous efforts to use the emotions we express in status updates to…

How do companies creating new technologies featuring new forms of personal data respond to the radical uncertainty of designing data ecosystems and accompanying business models with that sensitive data?

This dissertation answers this question with an empirical, inductive, multiple case comparison of the development of pioneering fitness technologies by Suunto, Garmin, and Adidas. Cases…

Cognitive task analysis is a laborious process made more onerous in educational platforms where many problems are user created and mostly left without identified knowledge components. Past approaches to this issue of untagged problems have centered around text mining to impute knowledge components (KC). In this work, we advance KC imputation research by modeling both the content (text) of a…

In this paper, we demonstrate a first-of-its-kind adaptive intervention in a MOOC utilizing real-time clickstream data and a novel machine learned model of behavior. We detail how we augmented the edX platform with the capabilities necessary to support this type of intervention which required both tracking learners’ behaviors in real-time and dynamically adapting content based on each learner’…

“Should be read by anyone interested in understanding the future,” The Times Literary Supplement raved about the original edition of The Social Life of Information. We’re now living in that future, and one of the seminal books of the Internet Age is more relevant than ever.

The future was a place where technology was supposed to empower individuals and obliterate…

We live in an information society, or so we are often told. But what does that mean? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise, informal account of the ways in which information and society are related and of our ever-increasing dependence on a complex multiplicity of messages, records, documents, and data. Using information in its everyday, nonspecialized sense…

The development and deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly emerging as the next major step in the ongoing evolution of the digital society and economy. To gain better insight and foresight into key characteristics that will differentiate this more intensely connected future from the present, we shift the focus of attention in this paper from the Internet of ‘things’ per se, to…

We present a microsociology of Minecraft play based on ethnographic observations of a 40-hour co-located Minecraft camp for 28 low-income and minority children in July 2015, supplemented by usage statistics and follow-up interviews. We consider the equity challenges presented by (1) Minecraft itself and the ecosystem supporting it; (2) the multiplayer server we used, which was founded on…

Poverty is one of the most important determinants of adverse health outcomes globally, a major cause of societal instability and one of the largest causes of lost human potential. Traditional approaches to measuring and targeting poverty rely heavily on census data, which in most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are unavailable or out-of-date. Alternate measures are needed to…

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) generate a granular record of the actions learners choose to take as they interact with learning materials and complete exercises towards comprehension. With this high volume of sequential data and choice comes the potential to model student behaviour. There exist several methods for looking at longitudinal, sequential data like those recorded from learning…

In the 1950’s a group of artists led by experimental composer John Cage actively engaged chance as a means to limit their control over the artworks they produced. These artists described a world filled with active and lively forces, from the sounds of rain to blemishes in paper, that could be harnessed in creative production to give rise to new aesthetics and cultivate new sensitivities to the…

Background: Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a complex global problem, not only because it is a human rights issue, but also because it is associated with chronic mental and physical illnesses as well as acute health outcomes related to injuries for women and their children. Attitudes, beliefs, and norms regarding IPV are significantly associated with the likelihood of both…

Regulators and privacy advocates increasingly demand that privacy be protected through the technical design of products and services, as well as through organizational procedures and policies. Privacy research by computer scientists and engineers are producing insights and techniques that empower a new professional in the technology sector—the privacy engineer. Despite great enthusiasm for…

This article examines one of the largest interventions in computer-based learning currently underway, the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project, with 2.5 million laptops in use worldwide. Drawing on 2010 and 2013 fieldwork investigating a project in Paraguay with 10,000 of OLPC's “XO” laptops, I explore the ways in which participants interpreted leisure laptop use as “learning.” I show that the…

The meaning of privacy has been much disputed throughout its history in response to wave after wave of new technological capabilities and social configurations. The current round of disputes over privacy fuelled by data science has been a cause of despair for many commentators and a death knell for privacy itself for others. We argue that privacy’s disputes are neither an accidental feature of…

Computational social science is an emerging field at the intersection of statistics, computer science, and the social sciences. This paper addresses the philosophical foundations of this new field. Kant and Peirce provide an understanding of scientific objectivity as intersubjective validity. Modern mathematics, and especially the mathematics of algorithms and statistics, get their objectivity…