SoCS: Collaborative Research: Novel Algorithms and Interaction Mechanisms to Enhance Social Production

数以百万计的人使用社会媒体技术来组织自己，生产有价值的信息和工件，比如维基百科、GNU/Linux和PatientsLikeMe。然而，这些社区存在着显著的问题：(1)它们很好地让人们维持现有的关系，并找到与自己相似的人，从而促进了自我隔离和意见两极分化。(2)知识生产民主化，但以专家参与贬值为代价。它们让人们接受来自遥远地方的新鲜思想，但很少有网站能融入家乡社区丰富的当地知识。这个项目通过创建算法和用户界面来解决这些问题，这些算法和用户界面推动个人和社区进入更有效的社会联系和互动模式。智力价值包括：(1)识别人们用来建立社交网络的原则，他们考虑的潜在联系人的范围，以及他们遇到潜在联系人的背景。(2)不同社会网络结构对解决一系列现实决策任务的有效性的实证知识。(3)新颖的社会推荐算法，最大限度地提高网络有效性，并推荐作为沟通和连接上下文的交互机会。更广泛的影响：本研究将在两个社会利益领域的背景下进行，即养育子女和骑自行车，从而产生更广泛的影响。向人们提供信息，使他们有信心更多地骑自行车，从而提高他们的个人健康，减少空气污染，并提高社区凝聚力。研究表明，拥有更大、更多样化的社交网络的父母会做出更好的育儿决定，而且父母也会在特定问题上寻求专家的建议。因此，一个帮助人们形成有效的社会网络，并为专家教育工作者提供机会的系统，给父母带来了直接的好处。更好的父母也往往更多地参与社区活动；因此，改善社区卫生是一个额外的效果。最后，通过研究小组与家长教育工作者的联系，该项目将明确针对低收入家庭的父母，他们最需要支持和信息。

Millions of people used social media technologies to organize themselves to produce information and artifacts of value, such as Wikipedia, GNU/Linux, and PatientsLikeMe. However, these communities have significant problems: (1) They work so well to let people maintain existing relationships and find others who are similar to them that they can promote self-segregation and opinion polarization. (2) Knowledge production has been democratized, but at the price of devaluing expert participation. (3) They open people to fresh ideas from far-off places, but few sites incorporate the rich local knowledge of home communities. This project addresses these problems by creating algorithms and user interfaces that nudge individuals and communities into more effective patterns of social connections and interaction. The intellectual merit includes: (1) Identification of principles people use to build their social networks, the range of potential contacts they consider, and the contexts in which they encounter potential contacts. (2) Empirical knowledge of the effectiveness of different social network structures for solving a range of realistic decision-making tasks. (3) Novel social recommendation algorithms that maximize network effectiveness and that recommend interaction opportunities that serve as contexts for communication and connection.Broader impacts: This research will be performed in the context of two domains of societal interest, parenting and bicycling, enabling significant broader impacts. Providing people information that gives them confidence to bicycle more increases their personal health, decreases air pollution, and improves community cohesion. Research shows that parents with larger and more diverse social networks make better parenting decisions, and that parents also seek expert advice for specific issues. Therefore, a system that helps people form effective social networks and that provides access to expert educators offers direct benefits to parents. Better parents also tend to be more involved in their communities; thus, improved community health is a bonus effect. Finally, through the research team's connections with parent educators, the project will explicitly target parents from low-income families, who have the greatest needs for support and information.