Bay Area Alumni Gathering

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"Pensieve: Supporting reminiscence with social media"

Presented by: University of Minnesota alumnus Dan Cosley

Note: Speaker change

Please join us for the Third Annual Bay Area Alumni Gathering hosted by the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Thursday, August 12, 2010
Hahn Auditorium
Computer History Museum
1401 N. Shoreline Boulevard
Mountain View, CA 94043

About the event

6 p.m. – Reception
Meet Department of Computer Science and Engineering Head Vipin Kumar, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Head David Lilja, and local University of Minnesota alumni for an evening of socializing and networking. The museum will be open and docents will be available to guide tours. Complimentary hors d’oeuvres will be served. Cash bar.

7 p.m. – Lecture: “Pensieve: Supporting reminiscence with social media”
Join computer science alumnus Dan Cosley, assistant professor in information science at Cornell University, in discussing research around human-computer interaction and social media. His high-level research goal is to build systems that leverage people's pre-existing behavior in digital media to create new individual and social goods.

About the lecture

People create enormous amounts of content in social media such as Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, and Blogger. Because these media focus on awareness and current activity, most of this content disappears under the sea of the new, never to be seen again. In this talk we'll explore how systems can re-use this user-created content to help them better understand themselves. We'll focus on Pensieve, a system that uses social media content to help people both reminisce and write more about their past. Its design was driven by a series of interviews and prototypes, and it was deployed for six months both as a stand-alone website and on Facebook. Our experiences suggest that systems that support reminiscence are interesting both as a topic of academic study and as practical tool to improve people's lives.

About the speaker

University of Minnesota computer science alumnus Dan Cosley is an assistant professor in information science at Cornell University who conducts research around human-computer interaction and social media. His high-level research goal is to build systems that leverage people's pre-existing behavior in digital media to create new individual and social goods. These include SuggestBot, a recommender system that uses Wikipedia editing behavior and link structure to help contributors find articles they are interested in and that the community has marked as needing work, and Pensieve, a system that reminds people to reminisce and write about the past by sending them prompts based on content they have created in social media. This work is supported by a 2009 NSF CAREER grant. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in 2006 from the University of Minnesota under the guidance of University of Minnesota computer science and engineering professors John Riedl and Loren Terveen.