Welcome!

Hi there. I'm Justin, a graduate student in Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon. This is my research page at CMU; if you are interested in my personal site, please check out jweisz.org.

My research is in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI); specifically, I am interested in online communities, and how individuals form relationships with other community members. Currently, I have been looking at the activity of shared video watching, and how groups of people have conversations while watching videos. As it turns out, talking about videos while watching them is a lot of fun, and a great way to meet other people. But, it's also distracting, and I'm currently working on ways of reducing this distraction.

I am co-advised by Sara Kiesler in the Human Computer Interaction Institute and Hui Zhang in the Computer Science Department.

I am a member of the End System Multicast project, a peer-to-peer video broadcasting system. I am also a member of the Community Lab, a joint collaboration between Carnegie Mellon, the University of Minnesota and the University of Michigan.

Before my research took a turn towards the human aspects of computing, I was involved in the 100x100 Clean Slate Project.

Other Information

I was the coordinator for the Community Lab seminar series (Fall 2006).

I did two summer internships at IBM TJ Watson Research: the first for the Enhanced Web Experience Group (Summer 2004), and the second for the Social Computing Group (Summer 2005). Yes, I am proud to be a Bob!

I was the NetTalk coordinator for Spring 2004.

As an undergraduate at CMU, I have served as President, Vice President, and Tournament Coordinator for the Online Gaming Society. This was quite an experience in building a community of video gamers at CMU, and getting them out of the dorm rooms to play games together!