M.S. student receives Outstanding Poster recognition at CSCW 2020

Ruyuan Wan, an M.S. student in the data science program, earned the Outstanding Poster award at the 23rd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW).

The poster, “How much is a “like” worth? Engagement and retention in an online health community” presented research into the impact of likes and comments on CaringBridge user retention. The 2020 Poster Chairs acknowledged the work as one of the two top submitted posters for this year’s event.

“It is exciting that this poster received recognition by the CSCW community. As a master’s student, I am still exploring whether my interests are in academia or industry. This award from CSCW encourages me to continue working on research,” said Wan.

Ruyuan received her B.A. in Statistics from the University of Minnesota in 2018. In addition to her data science graduate studies, she is also a research assistant in GroupLens.

Her mentors and collaborators on this project were her GroupLens colleagues, Ph.D. student Zachary Levonian and associate professor Svetlana Yarosh (who is also her graduate advisor).

"This paper represents a triumph of collaboration between the University of Minnesota and CaringBridge.org,” shared Levonian. “It means a lot to me and our team that we can do research that both supports CaringBridge's charitable mission and advances the research understanding of online communities."