Abstract
We are in the midst of extraordinary change in how people interact with one another and with information. A combination of advances in technology and change in people’s expectations is altering the way products are sold, scientific problems are solved, software is written, elections are conducted, and government is run.People are social animals, and as Shirky notes, we now have tools that are flexible enough to match our in-built social capabilities. Things can get done that weren’t possible before because the right expertise, the missing information, or a large enough group of people can now be gathered together at low cost.These developments open a number of interesting research questions. and potentially change how scientific research should be conducted. In this talk I will attempt to summarize and put some structure around some of these developments.
Biography
Prof. Marti Hearst is a professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, with an affiliate appointment in the Computer Science Division. Her primary research interests are user interfaces for search engines, information visualization, natural language processing, and empirical analysis of social media. She has just completed the first book on Search User Interfaces.Prof. Hearst received BA, MS, and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, and she was a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC from 1994 to 1997.Prof. Hearst has served on the Advisory Council of NSF’s CISE Directorate and is co-chair of the Web Board for CACM. She is a member of the Usage Panel for the American Heritage Dictionary and is on the Edge.org panel of experts. Prof. Hearst is on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on the Web and ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction and was formerly on the boards of Computational Linguistics , ACM Transactions on Information Systems, and IEEE Intelligent Systems.Prof. Hearst has received an NSF CAREER award, an IBM Faculty Award, a Google Research Award, an Okawa Foundation Fellowship, two Excellence in Teaching Awards, and has been principle investigator for more than $3M in research grants.Prof. Hearst was for many years a researcher in the QCA group at Xerox PARC, and before that a member of the BAIR group in graduate school.