Aurora: Mobile Social Support

Geri Gay, JP Pollak, Phil Adams, Daniel Tattersall, John Leornard, MD., Andrew Dannenberg, MD., Laura Forlano, and Michael Lin

We have created Aurora, a mobile phone-based application that allows patients to quickly and easily share their current mood and emotions with one another. Users select photos that they feel represent their current emotional state, and can likewise view the current emotional state of their peers. Aurora supports a range of forms of communication designed to help each user balance their own privacy with their desire for social interaction, and encourages them to reach out to one another in times of need or maintain distance as appropriate. Users can play games with one another that test their perceptions of the images selected by others, adding depth to the level of engagement and interactivity. This rich interaction, centered on the sharing of emotion, should help a greater number people reap more of the benefits of quality social support. For more information on this project, please click here.

Aurora is a collaboration with Andy Dannenburg, MD and John Leonard, MD at Weill Cornell Medical College and is funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Persuasive and Supportive Technologies for Weight Control in Young Adults

Christine Olson, Jeff Niederdeppe, Geri Gay, and Jill Freeman

The goal of the project is to examine the use of mobile phone and online social media to help prevent weight gain in young low income mothers. During the course of the project, we will examine the impact of various messages, social networks, and feedback tools on the target population.

Funding for this project is provided by NIH.

Vera

Geri Gay, JP Pollak, Daniela Retelny, Kyle Schustak, Stuart Davis, Amy Gonzales and Vera Khovanskaya

A key to behavior change is the ability to intervene at the point of decision. In health behavior, this could be the moment one must decide between taking the elevator or the stairs or whether or not to eat a piece of cake. These are also the moments where it is most difficult to reach people--they occur throughout the day, often randomly, in any location. Fortunately, the ubiquity and awareness of today's mobile phones provides us with a solution. The goal of this project is to explore the use of the mobile phone as a behavioral interrupt: how, at the point of health-related decisions, can we encourage people to take a moment to think about the ramifications of their decision, reflect on past decisions, and ultimately make healthier choices? The application, codenamed Vera, is currently in testing, but we will reveal more information soon!

Vera

VERA-Roc is a field study which tested the VERA mobile software on clamshell phones with post-partum women of all income levels in Rochester, New York. One goal of this project is to better understand the impact of health-related text-based prompts on participants' decision-making and health behavior. The busy new mothers took photographs of their health-related decisions throughout the day using their phones, rated and commented on their decisionmaking and provided social support through a web interface. The study was conducted with 44 women in five separate groups who used the system for two week periods, and uploaded almost 1200 images in total. Participants provided feedback through follow-up phone interviews. The new mothers have reported becoming aware of their decision-making, changing their behavior and discovering linkages between their stress level and health decisions.

Social Networks and Knowledge Dissemination

PI: Jon Kleinberg, Co PIs: Lillian Lee, Dan Huhenlocher, Dan Cosley, and Geri Gay

The purpose of this research is to assist in the detailed statistical and observational study of social and information networks. During the course of this project, computer scientist and social scientists will develop various means to extract and analyze information from vast amount of social network data.

Funding for the project is provided by NSF HCC - National Science Foundation, Human Centered Computing.

Computational Supports for Frame Reflections

Eric Baumer, Karen Rosenblatt, Kamran Munshi

The internet, social media, and online communication have great potential as a platform for political engagement. The wealth of content available and the wide variety of means for participation facilitate civic engagement, from seeking political information to engaging in political discussion and deliberation. However, the constantly and rapidly increasing quantity of political content produced on a daily basis can be difficult to understand and sort through, particularly with respect to how issues are framed.

Such challenges are not entirely unique to political discussion. However, relatively little work has involved applying existing computational techniques for textual analysis to support awareness of and reflection about framing in political discourse, nor has much research sought to understand how the design of tools that leverage such techniques can mediate political discussion and deliberation. These computational methods may be able to transform the problems of scale, i.e., overwhelming amounts of content, into a resource, i.e., a data source from which to draw insightful analyses.

This project involves the design, implementation, and evaluation of tools that incorporate computational analysis techniques to support frame reflection into the processes of online political engagement. This work involves the application of existing analytic methods and the development of novel computational techniques, as well as evaluation in two real-world settings: in public deliberative forums and with readers of political blogs.

Farmers Market

Geri Gay, Eric Baumer, Megan Halpern, Vera Khovanskaya

Environmental sustainability has become an increasingly pressing issue. One main focus has been on reducing harmful emissions that result from the transportation of goods by purchasing good closer to the their point of origin, i.e., buying locally. While not always an option for every type of product, locally grown food is a viable alternative for many to mass produced or highly processed foods. One common means of buying and selling locally grown produce is through farmers' markets, periodic collections of stands where farmers come to sell their crops directly to consumers. However, the farmers' market is not merely about being sustainable, it's also about, among other things, supporting the local economy, supporting fair labor practices, getting the freshest produce available, and spending time with friends and family. To understand the complex interconnections between these many and varied concerns, we are conducting a series of design-oriented studies around the Ithaca Farmers' Market. Through this work, we will gain an appreciation of the practical, day-to-day, lived enactment of sustainability.

Design Collaborations as Socio-technical Systems

Laura Forlano and Geri Gay

Design methods are rapidly being incorporated into many sectors of the economy and reshaping the ways in which we visualize and understand science and engineering. Focusing on design work at four firms in three countries, this project studies hybrid virtual teams to identify which phases of the design process can be performed virtually and which require face-to-face interaction. In addition, it will build a prototype to aid in collaborative design activities by improving trust, building a social network, and providing visualization tools. Relying on theories from communications, information science and science and technology studies, the research team will use ethnographic observation and qualitative interviews with participants in cross-cultural design collaborations that include design professionals and under-served urban populations addressing issues of social innovation and sustainability. Through this research, we will gain a better understanding of the degree to which culture, context and environment play a key role in the adoption and use of information and communication technologies to facilitate interaction and trust-building in virtual organizations.

Funding for this project is provided by NSF VOSS - National Science Foundation, Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems.