Title: Motivation and Motivators in Social Computing
Dr. Gary Hsieh
Dept of Comm and TISM
Date: Nov 11, 2011
Time: 2:00pm
Room: 1345 EB
Abstract:
In this talk, I will present both past and current projects on the use of
incentives and motivators to support information exchange and communication
between people. Consider this: just 5 years ago, it was not feasible to reward
someone a few cents their help: the overhead cost of paying the money (e.g.,
delivering the money) would have been much more than the actual payment.
However, advances in payment technologies have enabled us to use micropayment
systems for many different purposes (e.g., paying for work on Mechanical Turk).
And, this is only one of the many types of incentives and motivators enabled by
technology – we can integrate financial payments, reputation systems, game
mechanisms, intelligent message tailoring, donation rewards, and a number of
other ways to motivate behavior. The challenge is, how do we integrate these
motivators effectively in our technologies? What are the effects and side
effects of using these motivators?
Bio:
Gary Hsieh is a joint-appointed Assistant Professor in the Departments of
Communication and Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media. He is also
affiliated with the Health and Risk Communication Center in the College of Arts
and Sciences. His research focus is on studying, designing and developing
technologies to enable people to interact in ways that are efficient and
welfare-improving. He has conducted research at a number of industry research
labs, including Microsoft, IBM, Intel and Fuji-Xerox. He received his Ph.D. from
the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and his
B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California,
Berkeley.