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Interests and Activities:   professional | personal
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Office hours By appointment and as announced in courses

   Research Interests and Projects

 

BALANCE: Enhancing Diversity in News and Opinion Aggregators

 (Funded by NSF under Grant No. IIS- 0916099. Former Ph.D. students and postdoc: Sean Munson, Xiaodan Daniel Zhou, Sidharth Chhabra, Souneil Park)

Aggregators such as Reddit, and Google News rely on ratings and links to select and present subsets of the large quantity of news and opinion items generated each day. If a majority of the raters or linkers share a political viewpoint, minority viewpoints may get little representation in the results, creating an echo chamber for the majority. The goals of this research are to: 1) form alternative measures of diversity for result sets; 2) develop algorithms for selecting result sets that jointly optimize for diversity and popularity; 3) assess the impacts of alternative selection and presentation methods on people’s willingness to use an aggregation service, their exposure to diverse opinions, and the size of their argument repertoires. The results of the project will provide a better understanding of alternative notions of what it means for a set of items to be diverse or balanced, and the range of reactions that different people have to varying levels and presentations of diversity.

RumorLens

RumorLens is a suite of interactive tools that are designed to help journalists identify new rumors on Twitter and assess the audiences that rumor and correction tweets have reached. The tools make efficient use of human labor to assess whether a rumor’s content is interesting enough to warrant further exploration, to label tweets as spreading, correcting, or unrelated to the rumor, and to analyze the rumor visually. Behind the scenes, automated learning and computation amplify the effectiveness of that labor, making it feasible to engage journalists and the broader public to run a continuous rumor-monitoring service.

 (Joint work with Qiaozhu Mei, Rahul Sami, and Dragomir Radev. Funded by NSF under Grant No. IIS- 0968489 with additional support from Google. Ph.D. Students Sam Carton, Cheng Li, Yue Wang, and Zhe Zhao )

Commit To Steps: Social Approaches to Health and Wellness

The Commit To Steps project is investigating techniques for generating social support and social accountability, to enhance commitment to health behavior change, especially increased physical activity.

 (Joint work with Sean Munson, Caroline Richardson, and Erin Krupka. Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Ph.D. student Chanda Phelan.)

MTogether

Most electronic behavior traces available to social scientists offer a site-centric view of behavior. We argue that in order to understand patterns of interpersonal communication and media consumption, there is a need for a more person-centric view. The ideal research platform would capture reading as well as writing and friending behavior, behavior across multiple sites, and demographic and psychographic variables. It would also offer opportunities for researchers to make interventions that make changes and additions to the information presented to people in social media interfaces. Any attempt to create such an ideal platform will have to make compromises because of engineering and privacy constraints. We describe one attempt to navigate those tensions: the MTogether project will recruit a panel of participants who will install a browser extension and mobile app that enable limited data collection and interventions.

 (Joint work with Eytan Adar and Cliff Lampe. Funded by Google, with additional support from Facebook and from NIH 1R01AA023974-01.

Courses

Fall 2013 through Fall 2016

UMSI 106 Programs, Information and People

Fall 2013:

SI 701 Doctoral Foundations Seminar

Winter 2012:

SI429: e-communities

SI/EECS 182

Winter 2011:

SI429: e-communities

SI/EECS 182

Fall 2010:

SI529: e-communities

Winter 2010:

SI529: e-communities

SI/EECS182

Fall 2009:

SI755: Social Computing PhD Seminar

Winter 2009:

SI529: e-communities

SI/EECS182

Winter 2008:

SI684/884: e-communities

SI631: Content Management Systems (PEP Workshop project course)

Fall 2006:

SI502 Networked Computing: Storage, Communication, and Processing (Ctools site only; no public site)

Winter 2007:

SI505: Drupal Boot Camp

SI631: Content Management Systems (PEP Workshop project course)

Fall 2006:

Recommender Systems

SI575: Community Information Corps Seminar

Winter 2006:

SI684/884: e-communities

Fall 2005:

SI540: Understanding Networked Computing  (2005 placeout information)

SI544: Statistics

Winter 2005:

SI575: Community Information Corps Seminar

SI684/884: e-communities

Fall 2004:

SI540: Understanding Networked Computing

SI644: Statistics

Fall 2003:

CMU CSCW/Online Communities course (co-taught with Bob Kraut)

Winter 2003:

SI684/884: e-communities

Fall 2002:

SI540: Understanding Networked Computing (no longer available on-line)

Winter 2002:

SI598/698: Dot.Org Incubator (Practical Engagement Workshop)

SI575: Community Information Corps Seminar

SI684: e-communities

 

Fall 2001:

SI598/698: Dot.Org Incubator (Practical Engagement Workshop)
SI540: Understanding Networked Computing (no longer available on-line)

SI575: Community Information Corps Seminar

 

Winter 2001:

SI575: Community Information Corps Seminar

Fall 2000:

SI540: Understanding Networked Computing (no longer available on-line)

SI575: Community Information Corps Seminar

Personal Interests and Activities

Music

I play the fiddle and guitar, and sing, mostly country and folk styles.

Sports

Kayaking, biking, and running. Occasionally tennis. Formerly soccer and ultimate Frisbee.

Book

·         Kraut, R. E., P. Resnick, with S. Kiesler, Y. Ren, Y. Chen, M. Burke, N. Kittur, J. Riedl and J. Konstan (2012). Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press. (Website for the book; Amazon page)

 

                                                                                                            

Papers

As of 2011, this listing is no longer kept up to date. Google Scholar does a better job, though not perfect. See my page there.

·         Ockenfels, Axel, and Paul Resnick. “Negotiating Reputations”. In Handbook of Conflict Resolution, edited by Gary Bolton and Rachel Croson. Forthcoming. Oxford University Press.

·         Garrett, R. Kelly, and Paul Resnick. "Resisting Political Fragmentation on the Internet." Daedalus 140(4): 108-120.

·         Zhou, Daniel Xiaodan, Resnick, Paul, and Qiaozhu Mei. “Classifying the Political Leaning of News Articles and Users from User Votes.” Proceedings of ICWSM 2011 Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. Barcelona. p. 417-424.

·         Munson, Sean A, and Paul Resnick. “The Prevalence of Political Discourse in Non-Political Blogs”. Proceedings of ICWSM 2011 Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. Barcelona. p. 233-240.

·         Munson, Sean A, Rosengren, Emily, and Paul Resnick. “Thanks and Tweets: Comparing Two Public Displays”. Proceedings of CSCW 2011. ACM. New York, NY.

·         Newman, Mark W, Lauterbach, Debra, Munson, Sean A, Resnick, Paul, and Margaret E Morris. “'It's not that I don't have problems, I'm just not putting them on Facebook': Challenges and Opportunities in Using Online Social Networks for Health”. Proceedings of CSCW 2011. ACM, New York, NY.

·         Lampe, Cliff, Resnick, Paul, Forte, Andrea, Yardi, Sarita , Rotman, Dana, Marshall, Todd , and Wayne Lutters, "Educational Priorities for Technology-Mediated Social Participation," IEEE Computer, pp. 60-67, November, 2010 http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MC.2010.316

·         Jian, Lian, MacKie-Mason, Jeffrey K., and Paul Resnick (2010) "I Scratched Yours: The Prevalence of Reciprocation in Feedback Provision on eBay," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy. 10(1) (Contributions): Article 92.

·         Resnick, Paul, Janney, Adrienne, Buis, Lorriane R, and Caroline R Richardson, “Adding an online community to an Internet-mediated walking program. Part 2: Strategies for encouraging community participation”. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2010. 12(4):e72.

·         Richardson, Caroline, Buis, Lorraine, Janney, Adrienne, Goodrich, David, Sen, Ananda, Hess, Michael, Mehair, Kathleen, Fortlage, Laurie, Resnick, Paul, Zikmund-Fisher, Brian, Strecher, Victor, and John Piette. “An online community improves adherence in an Internet-mediated walking program. Part 1: Results of a randomized controlled trial.” Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2010. 12(4): e71.

·         Munson, Sean, and Paul Resnick. “Presenting Diverse Political Opinions: How and How Much”. Proceedings of CHI 2010. ACM, New York, NY. p. 1457-1466.

·         Munson, Sean, Lauterbach, Debra, Newman, Mark, and Paul Resnick. “Happier Together: Integrating a Wellness Application Into a Social Network Site”. in Proceedings of Persuasive '10.

·         Zhou, Daniel and Resnick, Paul. 2009. Assessment of conversation co-mentions as a resource for software module recommendation. Proceedings of RecSys '09. ACM, New York, NY, 133-140.

·         Buis LR, Poulton TA, Holleman RG, Sen A, Resnick PJ, Goodrich DE, Palma-Davis LV, Richardson CR. “Evaluating Active U: An internet-mediated physical activity program” BMC Public Health 2009, 9:331 (10 September 2009).

• Resnick, P. and Sami, R. 2009. Sybilproof transitive trust protocols Proceedings of ACM EC '09. Pages 345-354.
• Sean Munson, Daniel Xiaodan Zhou, Paul Resnick. Sidelines: An Algorithm for Increasing Diversity in News and Opinion Aggregators. Proceedings of ICWSM09 Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. San Jose, CA.
• Zhou, Daniel Xiaodan, Oostendorp, Nathan, Hess, Michael, and Resnick, Paul. Conversation Pivots and Double Pivots. Proceedings of CHI08 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Florence, Italy, pp. 1009-1012.
• Resnick, P. and Sami, R. 2008. The information cost of manipulation-resistance in recommender systems. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (Lausanne, Switzerland). RecSys '08. ACM, New York, NY, 147-154. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1454008.1454033
• Oostendorp, N. and Resnick, P. 2008. Three recommender approaches to interface controls reduction. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (Lausanne, Switzerland). RecSys '08. ACM, New York, NY, 235-242. DOI=  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1454008.1454045
• Resnick, P. and Sami, R. The Influence Limiter: Provably Manipulation-Resistant Recommender Systems. Proceedings of ACM RecSys 07 Conference on Recommender Systems. Minneapolis, MN. pp. 25-32.
• Lampe, C., Johnston, E. and Resnick, P. Follow the Reader: Filtering Comments on Slashdot. Proceedings of CHI 07 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. San Jose, CA, 2007. pp. 1253-1262.
• Hansen, Derek, Ackerman, Mark, Resnick, Paul, and Munson, Sean. Virtual Community Maintenance with a Collaborative Repository. Proceedings of ASIST 2007.
• Friedman, Eric, Resnick, Paul, and Sami, Rahul. Manipulation-Resistant Reputation Systems. Chapter 27 in Algorithmic Game Theory. Edited by Noam Nisan, Tim Roughgarden, Eva Tardos, and Vijay Vazirani. Cambridge University Press. 2007.
• Resnick, Paul, “Decomposing a Design Space”. In HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community. Edited by Thomas Erickson and David W. McDonald. MIT Press. 2007.
• Rashid, Al Mamunur, Ling, Kimberly, Tassone, Regina D, Resnick, Paul, Kraut, Robert, and Riedl, John. Motivating Participation by Displaying the Value of Contribution. In Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006, pp. 955-958.
• Resnick, Paul, Zeckhauser, Richard, Swanson, John, and Kate Lockwood. The Value of Reputation on eBay: A Controlled Experiment. Experimental Economics. Volume 9, Issue 2, Jun 2006, Page 79-101.
• Wash, Rick, Hemphill, Libby, and Resnick, Paul. Design Decisions in the RideNow Project. Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work, pp. 132-135.
• Khopkar, Tapan, Li, Xin, and Resnick, Paul. Self-Selection, Slipping, Salvaging, Slacking, and Stoning: the Impacts of Negative Feedback at eBay. Proceedings of ACM EC 05 Conference on Electronic Commerce. Vancouver, Canada. 2005, pp. 223-231.
• Miller, Nolan, Resnick, Paul, and Richard Zeckhauser. Eliciting Honest Feedback: The Peer Prediction Method. Management Science, Sept. 2005. 51(9), pp. 1359-1373.
• Horrigan, John, Garrett, Kelly and Resnick, Paul, "The Internet and Democratic Debate," Pew Internet and American Life Project, 10/27/04, 2004.
• Beenen, Gerard, Ling, Kimberly, Wang, Xiaoqing, Chang, Klarissa, Frankowski, Dan, Resnick, Paul, and Robert E Kraut. Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities. In Proceedings of ACM CSCW 2004 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Chicago, IL. 2004. A revised and expanded version appears as:
  Ling, K., Beenen, G., Ludford, P., Wang, X., Chang, K., Cosley, D., Frankowski, D., Terveen, L., Rashid, A. M., Resnick, P., and Kraut, R. (2005). Using social psychology to motivate contributions to online communities. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(4), article 10.
• Lampe, Cliff and Paul Resnick. Slash(dot) and Burn: Distributed Moderation in a Large Online Conversation Space. In Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vienna Austria. 2004.
• Resnick, Paul. Impersonal Sociotechnical Capital, ICTs, and Collective Action Among Strangers. in, Transforming Enterprise, William Dutton, Brian Kahin, Ramon O'Callaghan, and Andrew Wyckoff, Eds. MIT Press 2004.
• Resnick, Paul. Where Locality Meets Virtuality. In Making the Net Work: Sustainable Development in a Digital Society, edited by  Vidhya Alakeson, Tim Aldrich, James Goodman, and Britt Jorgensen. Xeris Publishing 2003.
• Resnick, Paul, Hansen, Derek, and Richardson, Caroline. Calculating Error Rates for Filtering Software. Communications of the ACM, September 2004.
• Hansen, Derek, Derry, Holly, Resnick, Paul, and Caroline Richardson, Adolescents Searching for Health Information on the Internet: An Observational Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research 2003. 5(4):e25.
• Richardson, Caroline, Resnick, Paul, Hansen, Derek, Derry, Holly, and Vicky Rideout, Does Pornography-Blocking Software Block Access to Health Information on the Internet? Journal of the American Medical Association, 2002. 288(22).
• Resnick, Paul and Vishant Shah. Photo Directories: A Tool for Organizing Sociability in Neighborhoods and Organizations. Working paper, September 2002.
• Resnick, Paul and Richard Zeckhauser. Trust Among Strangers in Internet Transactions: Empirical Analysis of eBay's Reputation System. The Economics of the Internet and E-Commerce. Michael R. Baye, editor. Volume 11 of Advances in Applied Microeconomics. Amsterdam, Elsevier Science. 2002. pp. 127-157.
• Resnick, Paul. Beyond Bowling Together: SocioTechnical Capital. Chapter 29 in "HCI in the New Millenium", edited by John M. Carroll. Addison-Wesley. 2002, pages 247-272.
• Boyte, Harry, and Paul Resnick, with Peter Levine, Robert Wachbroit, and Lew Friedland. White Paper: Civic Extension for the Information Age. Draft of July 23, 2001.
• A. Dieberger, P. Dourish, K. Höök, P. Resnick and A. Wexelblat. Social navigation: techniques for building more usable systems. Interactions, 7(6), November-December 2000, pages 36-45.
• Resnick, Paul, Zeckhauser, Richard, Friedman, Eric, and Kuwabara, Ko. Reputation Systems. Communications of the ACM, 43(12), December 2000, pages 45-48.
• Lessig, Lawrence and Paul Resnick. Zoning Speech on the Internet: a Legal and Technical Model. Michigan Law Review 98(2): 395-431.
• Friedman, Eric and Paul Resnick. The Social Cost of Cheap Pseudonyms. Journal of Economics and Management Strategy 10(2): 173-199
• Resnick, Paul.  PICS and Intellectual Freedom FAQ. Reprinted in Cyberlaw: Cases and Materials on the Internet, Digital Intellectual Property and Electronic Commerce, pp. 269-277.
• Cranor, Lorrie and Paul Resnick. Technology Inventory (for Internet Online Summit: Focus on Children).
• Cranor, Lorrie and Paul Resnick. Protocols for Automated Negotiations with Buyer Anonymity and Seller Reputations. Netnomics, 2000. 2(1): p. 1-23.
• Avery, Chris, Resnick, Paul, and Zeckhauser, Richard, The Market for Evaluations. American Economic Review 89(3): 564-584.
• Chu, Yang-hua, Joan Feigenbaum, Brian LaMacchia, Paul Resnick and Martin Strauss (1997). REFEREE: Trust Management for Web Applications, The World Wide Web Journal, special issue on "Web Security: a Matter of Trust," 1997, 2 (3), pp. 127-139.
• Blaze, Matt, Feigenbaum, Joan, Resnick, Paul, and Strauss, Martin, Managing Trust in an Information-Labeling System, European Transactions on Telecommunications, 8 (1997), pp. 491-501.
• Resnick, Paul. Filtering Information on the Internet. Paul Resnick. Scientific American, March 1997, pp. 106-108.
• Resnick, Paul and Varian, Hal. Recommender Systems, introduction to special section of Communications of the ACM, March 1997, vol. 40(3).
• Resnick, Paul and Miller, James, The CDA's Silver Lining. Wired, 1996, vol. 4(8), pp. 109-110.
• Resnick, Paul and Miller, James, PICS: Internet Access Controls Without Censorship, Communications of the ACM, 1996, vol. 39(10), pp. 87-93.
• Rekhter, Yakov, Resnick, Paul and Bellovin, Steve, Financial Incentives for Route Aggregation and Efficient Address Utilization in the Internet , Proceedings of the 1996 Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, Solomons, MD. Reprinted in, Coordinating the Internet, Brian Kahin and James Keller, eds. MIT Press.
• Resnick, Paul, Zeckhauser, Richard and Avery, Chris, Roles for Electronic Brokers, in Toward a Competitive Telecommunication Industry: Selected Papers from the 1994 Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, G. W. Brock, Ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995, pp. 289-304.
• Resnick, Paul and Virzi, Robert, "Relief from the Audio Interface Blues: An Expanded Spectrum of Menu, List, and Form Styles," ACM Transactions on CHI, 1995, vol. 2(2), pp. 146-177.
• Resnick, P., Iacovou, N., Suchak, M., Bergstrom, P. and Riedl, J. (1994). GroupLens: An Open Architecture for Collaborative Filtering of Netnews. In CSCW '94: Conference on Computer Supported Coorperative Work (Chapel Hill, 1994), ACM, pp. 175-186.
• Resnick, P. Phone-Based CSCW: Tools and Trials. ACM Transactions on Information Systems. October 1993, (1993).
• Davis, R. and Resnick, P. Multiple Dimensions of Generalization in Model-Based Troubleshooting. In AAAI 93 (Washington, DC, 1993), American Association for Artificial Intelligence, pp. 160-166.
• Resnick, P. A User Programmable Phone-Based Event Calendar. In AVIOS '93 (San Jose, CA, 1993), The American Voice Input/Output Society.
• Resnick, P. HyperVoice: A Phone-Based CSCW Platform. In CSCW '92: Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (Toronto, 1992), ACM, pp. 218-225.
• Resnick, P. and Virzi, R. A. Skip and Scan: Cleaning Up Telephone Interfaces. In CHI '92: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Monterey, CA, 1992), ACM, pp. 419-426.
• Virzi, R. A., Resnick, P. and Ottens, D. Skip and Scan Telephone Menus: User Performance as a Function of Experience. In Proceedings of the Human Factors Society (Santa Monica, CA, 1992), Human Factors Society, pp. 211-215.
• Resnick, P. The Smart Fast Forward Button. In Proceedings of the American Voice Input/Output Society (Minneapolis, MN, 1992), pp. 323-329.
• Resnick, P. and King, M. The Rainbow Pages: Building Community with Voice Technology. In Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing (Boston, MA, 1990), pp. 2-13.

PICS Technical Specification Documents

Evans, Christopher, Feather, Clive  D. W., Hopmann, Alex, Presler-Marshall, Martin and Resnick, Paul, PICSRules 1.1 W3C, Dec. 1997.

Miller, Jim, Paul Resnick and David Singer (1996). “Rating Services and Rating Systems (and Their Machine-Readable Descriptions),” The World Wide Web Journal 1(4): 23-43. Available on-line at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/PICS/services.html

Krauskopf, Tim, Jim Miller, Paul Resnick and Win Treese (1996) “Label Syntax and Communication Protocols,” The World Wide Web Journal 1(4): 45-69. Available on-line at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/PICS/labels.html
 

  Bio

Paul Resnick is the Michael D. Cohen Collegiate Professor of Information and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs at the University of Michigan School of Information. He previously worked as a researcher at AT&T Labs and AT&T Bell Labs, and as an Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He received the master's and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan.

Professor Resnick's research focuses on SocioTechnical Capital, productive social relations that are enabled by the ongoing use of information and communication technology. His current projects include nudging people toward politically balanced news consumption and health behavior change, and crowdsourcing rumor tracking and fact-correction on the Internet.

Resnick was a pioneer in the field of recommender systems (sometimes called collaborative filtering). Recommender systems guide people to interesting materials based on recommendations from other people.  The GroupLens system he helped develop was awarded the 2010 ACM Software Systems Award. His articles have appeared in Scientific American, Wired, Communications of the ACM, The American Economic Review, Management Science, and many other venues.  His 2012 MIT Press book (co-authored with Robert Kraut), was titled “Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-based Social Design”.