Social computing has permeated most aspects of our lives, from work to play. In recent years, however, social platforms have faced challenges ranging from labor concerns about crowd work to misinformation on social media. These and other challenges, along with the emergence of new technical platforms, create opportunities to re-imagine the future of the field. In this talk, I will discuss my research designing and deploying social computing systems to help people connect and collaborate to learn new skills, crowdsource news reporting, and delegate tasks to hybrid AI systems. First, I describe an online community I created to connect millions of young creators to learn computational thinking skills as they create, share, and remix games and animations on the web. Then I shift to how this work inspired my next set of systems to connect urban residents as they share news about their local communities. Finally, I will discuss a novel workplace productivity tool we created to enable information workers to delegate tasks to hybrid intelligence systems powered by humans and AI. I close by articulating the challenges and opportunities ahead for the field, and the ways my team is beginning to explore new systems that support more authentic and intimate connections, building on new technologies including wearables sensors and AR.
Bio: Andrés Monroy-Hernández is a lead research scientist at Snap Inc, where he manages the human-computing interaction research team. He is also an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. His work focuses on the design and study of social computing technologies that help people connect and collaborate. Previously, he was at Microsoft Research for six years, where he led the research and development of Calendar.help, Microsoft’s first hybrid AI product. His research has received best paper awards at CHI, CSCW, HCOMP, and ICWSM, and has been featured in The New York Times, CNN, Wired, BBC, and The Economist. Andrés was named one of the 35 Innovators under 35 by the MIT Technology Review magazine in Latin America, and one the most influential Latinos in Tech by CNET. Andrés holds master’s and Ph.D. from MIT, where he led the creation of the Scratch online community. He has a BS from Tec de Monterrey in México. More info at http://andresmh.com
Lunch for talk attendees will be available at 12:00pm.
To request accommodations for a disability, please contact Emily Lawrence, emilyl@cs.princeton.edu, 609-258-4624 at least one week prior to the event.
