Bio

Dr. Marc A. Smith

Chief Social Scientist

Connected Action Consulting Group

Marc@connectedaction.net

http://www.connectedaction.net

http://delicious.com/marc_smith/

Marc Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. He founded and managed the Community Technologies Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington and led the development of social media reporting and analysis tools for Telligent Systems. Smith leads the Connected Action consulting group and lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. Smith co-founded the Social Media Research Foundation (http://www.smrfoundation.org/), a non-profit devoted to open tools, data, and scholarship related to social media research.

Smith is the co-editor with Peter Kollock of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity; interaction and social order develop in online groups. Along with Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman, he is the co-author and editor of Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, from Morgan-Kaufmann, which is a guide to mapping connections created through computer-mediated interactions.

Smith's research focuses on computer-mediated collective action: the ways group dynamics change when they take place in and through social cyberspaces. Many "groups" in cyberspace produce public goods and organize themselves in the form of a commons (for related papers see: http://www.connectedaction.net/marc-smith/). Smith's goal is to visualize these social cyberspaces, mapping and measuring their structure, dynamics and life cycles. At Microsoft, he developed the "Netscan" web application and data mining engine that allows researchers studying Usenet newsgroups and related repositories of threaded conversations to get reports on the rates of posting, posters, crossposting, thread length and frequency distributions of activity. Smith applied this work to the development of a generalized community analysis platform for Telligent, providing a web based system for groups of all sizes to discuss and publish their material to the web and analyze the emergent trends that result. He contributes to the open and free NodeXL project (http://www.codeplex.com/nodexl) that adds social network analysis features to the familiar Excel spreadsheet. A tutorial on social network analysis is evolving into a book and is freely available (http://casci.umd.edu/NodeXL_Teaching). NodeXL enables social network analysis of email, twitter, flickr, www, facebook and other network data sets.

The Connected Action consulting group (http://www.connectedaction.net) applies social science methods in general and social network analysis techniques in particular to enterprise and internet social media usage. SNA analysis of data from message boards, blogs, wikis, friend networks, and shared file systems can reveal insights into organizations and processes. Community managers can gain actionable insights into the volumes of community content created in their social media repositories. Mobile social software applications can visualize patterns of association that are otherwise invisible.

Smith received a B.S. in International Area Studies from Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1988, an M.Phil. in social theory from Cambridge University in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2001. He is an affiliate faculty at the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington and the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. Smith is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Media-X Program at Stanford University.

marc@connectedaction.net

http://www.connectedaction.net

http://nodexl.codeplex.com

http://twitter.com/marc_smith

http://www.smrfoundation.org/

BEN SHNEIDERMAN (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben) is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/) at the University of Maryland. He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM) in 1997, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001, a Member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2010, and a Member of the National Academy of Inventors in 2016. He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.

Ben likes skiing, hiking, biking, and working with his students on new ideas. He developed the visual interface idea for the hyperlink with grad student Dan Ostroff in 1984, pioneered information visualization concepts with Christopher Ahlberg (who went on to found Spotfire, based on these concepts), developed the treemap concept, which was first implemented by grad student Brian Johnson, and participates in the NodeXL network analysis tool project.

Current projects focus on electronic health records with the EventFlow tool (http://hcil.umd.edu/eventflow) and promoting The New ABCs of Research (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/newabcs). He believes computer science should be more directly devoted to making the world a better place.

Derek L. Hansen is an Assistant Professor of Information Technology within Brigham Young University's College of Engineering and Technology. He was formerly at the University of Maryland's iSchool and Director for the Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information (http://casci.umd.edu), a multi-disciplinary research center focused on harnessing the power of novel social technologies to support the needs of real and virtual communities.

Dr. Hansen completed his PhD from the University of Michigan's School of Information where he was an NSF-funded interdisciplinary STIET Fellow (http://stiet.si.umich.edu/) focused on understanding and designing effective online socio-technical systems. His research and teaching focus on mass collaboration, information reuse, consumer health informatics, and social network analysis of online communities. One line of research is focused on helping community analysts make sense of the mass of social data available through social media sites. Another line of research applies those methods to understand best practices for supporting mass collaboration in medical, scientific, and entertainment domains. Finally, Dr. Hansen is involved with designing novel tools that take advantage of the unique properties of information technologies. For example, he has done work on "collection recommender systems" and social networking applications designed to anonymously disseminate information about stigmatized illnesses through friendship networks.