archive for the ‘uncategorized’ category

What are big research problems in Social Web technologies?

20 January 2010 | ed h. chi

Just finished reading Dion Hichcliffe's piece over at ZDNet on emerging technologies for Social Web in 2010. I have been reading all these different predictions to see how it relates to our research agenda. Dion's piece is long, but several points re...

A Study on Efficient Diffusion of News in an Organization

14 December 2009 | ed h. chi

[joint work between Les Nelson, Rowan Nairn, Ed H. Chi] In our knowledge economy, enterprises’ competitiveness often depend on the efficiency in which important news travels to the right people at the right times. Knowledge workers depend now heavi...

Part 4 on WikiSym paper: A proposed modified model of Wikipedia Growth

20 October 2009 | ed h. chi

As mentioned in the first post on the slowing growth rate of Wikipedia, it appears that article growth reached a peak around 2007. Rather than exponential growth, it appears that Wikipedia display logistic growth. A hypothetical logistic Lotka-Volter...

PART 3: Population Shifts in Wikipedia

22 September 2009 | ed h. chi

The research done at ASC continues to get more press, including Time magazine, NYTimes, Repubblica [Italian Newspaper]. We have been busy trying to put together a bunch more academic papers on Web2.0 (particularly some Twitter research we have been do...

PART 1: The slowing growth of Wikipedia: some data, models, and explanations

22 July 2009 | ed h. chi

In September of 2008, we blogged about a curious change in Wikipedia that we didn't know how to explain that we had known for a while, and the ASC group has been looking into understanding this change in the last 6-9 months or so. The change that we w...

Science2.0 and Collaboratories

17 May 2009 | ed h. chi

I'm in Hong Kong on some personal business and have had some alone time to think about our research direction. One of the things we have been doing lately at PARC is understanding more about the past work on collaboration, and how it might be changed ...

Social bookmarks as traces left behind as navigational signposts

24 April 2009 | ed h. chi

Social tagging arose out of the need to organize found content that is worth revisiting. It is natural therefore to think of social tagging and bookmarking as navigational signposts for interesting content. The collective behavior of users who tagged...

Game theory and Cooperation in Social Systems

20 April 2009 | ed h. chi

It's almost 2am, but I have been thinking about a summary of a recent Nature paper I read while I was in Boston visiting MIT. I had picked up the article in MIT Tech Talk on a whim during a visit to the Stata Center where MIT's CSAIL laboratory is loc...

A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat!

20 March 2006 | PlayOn authors archive

The facial expression of avatars at the Black Sun nightclub, social hotspot in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), was so natural and nuanced, that it was “just as good as a face-to-face.” Unfortunately today’s metaverses (i.e., MMOGs) have a loooooong way to go before they approach that kind of sophistication.

There does not currently seem to be any consensus among game developers regarding the best way to implement facial expression. Different games employ different approaches. Yet each approach seems to grapple with the same basic problem: avatars’ facial expressions are usually hard to see. (Another basic problem is how to control them easily, but I’ll save that for another post.) The reason for this is that although avatar features and proportions tend to reflect those of real human bodies, the player’s visual perspective usually does not. Players tend to play from a perspective that is at least several feet...