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Projects
Over the years I have worked on projects ranging from attack detection in P2P networks to studying the impact of group SMS on small social groups.
| Whisper (2004 - Present) |
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| Links: |
Whisper Event Site |
| Affiliation: |
Carnegie Mellon University |
| Description: |
The goal of Whisper is to create an anytime-anywhere service that allows users to find community events that range from large-scale organized events like concerts to small scale events like community fairs and academic talks. The Whisper vision focuses on synthesis of online information, supporting human spontaneity, creating new opportunities for serendipity, supporting social synchronization that occurs around events, and maintaining secrecy of user preferences and activities. |
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| DanceAlong (2004) |
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| Links: |
None |
| Affiliation: |
Carnegie Mellon University |
| Description: |
The elderly face serious social, environmental, and physical constraints that impact their well-being. Some of the most serious of these are shrinking social connections, limitations in building new relationships, and diminished health. To address these issues, we have designed an augmented dancing environment that allows elders to select dance sequences from well-known movies and dance along with them. The goal of DanceAlong is twofold: (1) to provide entertainment and exercise for each individual user and (2) to promote social engagement within the group. We deployed DanceAlong in a cultural celebration at a senior community center and conducted evaluations. |
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| Swarm (2003 - 2004) |
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| Links: |
Swarm, MSR article |
| Affiliation: |
Microsoft Research, Social Computing Group |
| Description: |
The emergence of text messaging, also known as SMS (Short Message Service), has bolstered the socio-technical atmosphere of anywhere, anytime communication. This inexpensive, lightweight, and relatively new technology has been widely adopted as a medium of choice for communicating with friends, family and loved ones. Our research builds on text messaging to allow social groups to easily communicate, coordinate, and converge in a moment’s notice. Swarm is a text messaging service that allows members of a social group to broadcast messages to each other. Swarm is similar to email distribution lists with the added benefit of being designed to work on any SMS-enabled mobile phone. In user studies we found Swarm enhanced group awareness and coordination capabilities and increased the number of shared activities within groups. Direct observation and user feedback highlighted relevant usability issues which prompted several significant redesigns of our initial concept. |
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| mRNA (2002-2003) |
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| Links: |
Project Report |
| Affiliation: |
Stanford University and Agilent Technologies |
| Description: |
The mRNA project studied the use of digital annotations on a shared corpus as an efficient lightweight means of communication. The goal is to minimize communication overhead while maximizing the amount of relevant information that participants receive. Communication overhead can be detrimental to the success of group collaboration involving a large multi-disciplinary team working over an extended period of time. Another complexity of this collaboration deals with the numerous types of data (text, diagrams, experimental results, etc.).
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| PeerPressure (2002 - 2003) |
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| Links: |
Stanford Peers Group |
| Affiliation: |
Stanford Unviersity |
| Description: |
Peer-to-peer systems such as Gnutella are resilient to failures at a single point in the network because of their decentralized nature. However an attack resulting in the removal of a small percentage of highly connected nodes could cripple such systems. Peer Pressure is based on a distributed recovery method, where clients proactively detect attacks by monitoring the rate at which their first and second-degree neighbors leave the network and reconfigure themselves to form a topology that is more resilient to attacks when one has been detected. This topology is created and maintained through a new type of node discovery mechanism that is used during normal network operations. The recovery method is able to reconnect the network and deal with any ongoing attacks once one has started. |
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