CAREER: Individual Attributes and Social Participation: Designing for Citizen Science

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This project seeks to transform the study of technology-mediated social participation through the human-centered computing equivalent of genetically targeted medicine. Just as advances in medicine enable us to use information about a person's genetic profile to target medical treatment to his needs, information about a user's personal attributes such as his motivations and personality traits can be used to target individually-tailored, theory-driven design aimed at increasing the user's participation in technology-mediated social efforts. The research focus is on technology-mediated citizen science, which offers an ideal laboratory for studying issues that are important in many other fields. The project will involve three citizen science modalities: distributed analysis, distributed data gathering, and volunteer computing. The research will test the effectiveness of design features informed by social psychology theory and human-computer interaction research, and develop a rigorous theoretical understanding of individually-tailored design.The project seeks to advance human-centered computing theory and practice. The intellectual merits of the research therefore include: 1) advancing technology-mediated social participation theory by developing a theoretical framework that combines personal attributes and design; 2) developing and testing empirically a novel technique and specific design guidelines to enhance technology-mediated social participation, with application to citizen science projects.The unique setting of this research within the citizen science domain promises long-term benefits to society and science. In particular, the broader impacts of the research include: 1) leveraging technology-mediated social participation and citizen science to engage members of the public in science and scientific work, and in particular, members of disadvantaged communities to whom traditional science-related activities may otherwise not be accessible; 2) enhancing the infrastructure for scientific research through effective citizen science; and 3) integrating technology-mediated citizen science in outreach programs.