2007 KMWorld Presentation on Augmented Social Cognition Research at PARC

Web 2.0 in the Enterprise Improving collaboration through research insights in coordination costs KMWorld & Intranets 2007 November 7, 2007 Ed H. Chi, Ph.D. Manager, Augmented Social Cognition Area echi@parc.com Lawrence C. Lee Director of Business Development lawrence.lee@parc.com Intelligent Systems Laboratory Palo Alto Research Center Inc.

PARC Overview   Interdisciplinary research center   Founded in 1970   Spun out of Xerox in 2002   Business model: –  Contract research –  Licensing –  Joint ventures –  Spinoffs KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 2

Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 Software as a Service (SaaS) Remixing and Mashup of Services Rich User Interactions Social Networks Network Effects and Collective Intelligence Disruptive New Collaboration Environments Potential KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 3

Benefits of Web 2.0   Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise: –  Blogs –  Wikis –  Social bookmarking –  RSS –  Search –  Social networking   Benefits –  Simple to set up –  Easy to use –  Knowledge captured as side effect of communication KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 4

Costs of Web 2.0   Benefits of Web 2.0 do not come for free –  Interference effects –  Interaction costs –  Noisy folksonomies   Research Methodology –  Analyze activity on social systems –  Develop models on interaction dynamics –  Design new systems to increase benefits and reduce cost –  Test systems in Living Laboratories KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 5

Research Foundation   PARC’s rich history of research in information systems –  User interface research –  Information foraging theory –  Sensemaking   Augmented Social Cognition –  Vision: Enhance the ability of a group of people to remember, think, and reason –  Combines cognitive science with social computing research KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 6

Outline   Overview –  Benefits of Web 2.0 in the Enterprise –  Costs of Web 2.0 »  Interference effects, interaction costs, noisy folksonomies   Three examples of PARC research and solutions –  WikiDashboard: Providing social transparency in Wikispaces –  SparTag.us: Lowering interaction costs in tagging systems –  TagSearch: Reducing noise in tagged data and harnessing tags for search KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 7

I. Interference Effects in Wikipedia Declining percentage of activity devoted to article editing in Wikipedia Source: Wikipedia (Kittur, Suh, Pendelton, Chi) KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 8

Visualizing Interference and Conflict Revert Graph for Wikipedia page: Terry Schiavo Anonymous (vandals/ spammers) Sympathetic to husband Mediators Sympathetic to parents Source: Wikipedia (Kittur, Suh, Pendelton, Chi) KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 9

WikiDashboard   Transparency of social dynamics can reduce conflict and coordination issues –  WikiDashboard: Social dashboard for wikis –  Prototype system: http://wikidashboard.parc.com   Visualization for every wiki page showing edit history timeline and top individual editors   Can drill down into activity history for specific editors and view edits to see changes side-by-side KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 10

WikiDashboard Summary   Key problems –  Lack of visibility into social dynamics of wikis –  Lack of transparency in individual activity   PARC’s solution –  Visualization of individual edit activity to increase transparency, accountability, and quality of wikis –  Connect individuals with shared interests by reviewing activity on specific wiki topics KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 11

II. Interaction Costs and Social Systems   Interaction costs determine # People willing to produce for “free” number of people who participate   Surplus of attention & motivation at small transaction costs   Therefore…   Important to keep interaction costs low Cost of participation KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 12

Social Bookmarking   Means of storing, annotating, and sharing links   Typically done for oneself   But implicit sharing promotes transfer of expertise   Lightweight form of enterprise knowledge sharing   Players: –  Del.icio.us –  Connotea –  CiteUlike –  and many enterprise social bookmarking systems (that operate behind the firewall) KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 13

SparTag.us   Social bookmarking is easy to do but there is still friction in the process –  Tagging in new window separate from document –  Tagging limited to page level even though you want to tag a paragraph only –  Tags and annotations do not remain with paragraphs if referenced on other pages   New approach: Make tagging and retrieval of tagged content easier   Lower interaction costs and increase participation KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 14

SparTag.us   Key innovations –  Click-to-tag –  Paragraph-level tags –  Social annotations –  Tag portability Highlights (annotations) Paragraph-level tagging KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 15

SparTag.us Summary   Key problems –  Friction in current tagging process –  Tags are limited to page level only –  Difficult to find content of interest on page later   PARC’s solution –  In situ tagging on the same page using click-to-tag –  Tags applied to paragraphs –  Tags and annotations stay with paragraph, even on new pages (e.g. block quote on a blog post) –  My SparTag.us notebook displays all tagged and annotated paragraphs KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 17

III. Noise in Social Tagging Systems   Folksonomies emerge from social tagging systems   Benefits –  Freeform tagging instead of conforming to rigid taxonomies –  More flexibility allows users to recall information later –  Information discovery using tag browsing   Weaknesses –  Noise –  Inconsistency –  Difficult to leverage for search KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 18

Information Theoretic Measures   Mutual information I(Doc; Tag) –  Amount of information known about documents given knowledge of tags   Conditional entropy H(Doc|Tag) I(Doc;Tag) –  Additional amount of H(Doc|Tag) information needed to be known in order to identify a document given knowledge of tags Knowledge Knowledge of tags of documents KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 20

H(Doc | Tag)   More information needs to be known over time, over and above what is given by tags Source: del.icio.us (Chi & Mytkowicz) KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 22

Rise in Average Tags per Bookmark   Note parallel with increasing average number of words in a search query Source: del.icio.us (Chi & Mytkowicz) KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 23

But Social Tagging Creates Noise •  Synonyms •  Misspellings •  Morphologies People use different tag words to express similar concepts. KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 24

Use Semantic Analysis to Reduce Noise Semantic Similarity Graph Web Tools Reference Guide Howto Tutorial Tips Help Tip Tutorials Tricks KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 25

TagSearch – A New Search Engine   New approach: harness human intelligence encoded in tags on documents and web pages to improve search precision KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 26

TagSearch Summary   Key problems –  Noisy tag data –  Users do not want to conform to rigid taxonomies –  Too many irrelevant results in enterprise search   PARC’s solution –  Let users tag freeform but use data mining techniques to reduce noise –  Harness normalized tag data in new search algorithm –  Result: High precision enterprise search engine trained on content tagged by enterprise community KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 27

Conclusion   Effective deployment of Web 2.0 tools requires understanding of both costs and benefits. –  Increasing transparency results in higher quality –  Lowering interaction costs results in higher participation –  Decreasing noise results in greater search precision   PARC works with enterprises to solve specific problems and deploy customized versions of its suite of Web 2.0 technologies. KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 28

Contacts   Stop by our booth at the Expo - Booth 313   Our contact information: Ed H. Chi, Ph.D. Manager, Augmented Social Cognition Area echi@parc.com 650.812.4312 Lawrence C. Lee Director of Business Development lawrence.lee@parc.com 650.812.4756 KM World & Intranets 2007 – © 2007 Palo Alto Research Center Inc. 29

2007 KMWorld Presentation on Augmented Social Cognition Research at PARC

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