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"Messenger Taps Social Nets"
 Technology Research News (07/21/04);
Patch, Kimberly

University of Michigan researcher Jun Zhang noticed that when he queried friends and colleagues via instant messaging and email to get answers to questions, they would often defer to one of their friends or colleagues; with funding from the National Science Foundation and Intel, Zhang has automated this process with the Small-World Instant Messaging System (SWIM). Zhang notes that SWIM supports a more complex user profile than the majority of instant messengers: The system not only permits a user to manually enter his expertise and interests, but can build a keyword vector to represent the user's information identity by automatically mining his homepage and browser bookmarks, while the information-querying process is automatically coordinated by a referral agent. The referral agent receives the user's question, and relays it to all of the user's friends' agents, and then an agent in the friend's messenger checks its information identity profile to see if that person can answer the question. When a probable match is determined, that person sees the question and the route it has followed, and can either reply immediately or later if he is too busy. Cornell University computer science professor Jon Kleinberg says that Zhang's system must meet two key challenges: Locating people with relevant information, which is accomplished by the embedding of navigational methods into the software, and motivating people to participate, a harder challenge because the further along a social network an inquirer travels, the less familiarity he has with the people the system refers to for answers. Zhang says SWIM is one component of a larger project to see how productivity is impacted by information streams. SWIM was detailed at the Association of Computing Machinery's Computer-Human Interaction 2004 conference.

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Contact me: junzh@umich.edu

 

    

I am currently a PhD candidate at School of Information, University of Michigan. I am working on my dissertation research "Expertise Networks in Online Communities and Organizations". My advisor is Professor Mark S. Ackerman. My dissertation committee include Professor Lada Adamic and George Furnas. Previously I have also worked with Professor Marshall Van Alstyne.

  • Research Areas - Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Social Network Analysis, Information Retrieval, Information Visualization.

  • Particular Topics - Expertise Sharing, Social Networks, Virtual Communities, Social Computing.

  • Curriculum Vita.

  • My Biographical Sketch.

Publications

  • Zhang, J., Adamic, L. Bakshy, E. and Ackerman, M. Everyone Knows Something: Exploring Knowledge Sharing in Yahoo Answers, working paper (submitted to www'08).

  • Zhang, J., Ackerman, M. S., and Adamic, L. Expertise Networks in Online Communities: Structure and Algorithms, accepted by the 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007), Banff, Canada, 2007.  (Acceptance rate: 14%). [paper]

  • Zhang, J., Ackerman, M. S., and Adamic, L. CommunityNetSimulator: Using Simulations to Study Online Community Network Formation and Implications, accepted by 3rd International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T2007), East Lansing, Michigan, 2007. [paper]

  • Zhang, J., Ye, Y., Ackerman, M.S., and Qu, Y. SISN: A Toolkit for Augmenting Expertise Sharing via Social Networks, accepted by 12th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCII2007), Beijing, China, 2007. [ paper]

  • Zhang, J. and Ackerman, M. S. 2005. Searching for expertise in social networks: a simulation of potential strategies. In Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP’05), Sanibel Island, Florida, 2005,   http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1099203.1099214

  • Lee, A., Girgensohn, A., and Zhang, J. 2004. Browsers to Support Awareness and Social Interaction. IEEE Computer Graphic and Applications, 24, 5 (Sep. 2004), 66-75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MCG.2004.24

  • Zhang, J. and Van Alstyne, M. 2004. SWIM: fostering social network based information search. In CHI '04 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’04), Vienna, Austria, 2004 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/985921.986144

  • Zhang, J. and Van Alstyne, M. 2004. Support knowledge sharing in social networks, In Proceedings of Annual Conference of the North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Sciences (NAACSOS’04), Pittsburg, PA, 2004

  • Van Alstyne, M. and Zhang, J. 2003. EmailNet: automatically mining social networks from organizational email communications, In Proceedings of Annual Conference of the North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Sciences (NAACSOS’03), Pittsburg, PA, 2003

  • Lee, A., Girgensohn, A., Zhang, J. 2003. Visualizing Web Communities, Human-Computer Interaction Consortium (HCIC’03), Winter Park, Colorado, 2003

  • Zhang, J. and Lee, A. 2002. eTree: a browse and query interface for online communities. In InfoVis’02 Extended Abstracts  on IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization 2002 (InfoVis’02), Boston, MA, 2002

  • Zhang, J., Ackerman, M.S., Adamic, L. and Nam, K.K. QuME: A Mechanism to Support Expertise Finding in Online Help-seeking Communities, accepted to UIST2007.

  • Qu, Y. and Zhang, J. Understanding Social Dilemma in Information Sharing Systems: A Simulation Approach, ASIST2007.

Grants & Patents

  • Patent pending: Van Alstyne, M. and Zhang, J. A Mechanism to Permit Analysis of Communication Content that Preserves Personal Privacy, filed April 2006

  • The Collaboratory for Advanced Research & Academic Technologies (CARAT 2005) Grand, a grand provided by University of Michigan to foster cutting-edge research on technologies for learning and teaching across the university.

Software/System Developed

Other activities

  • I am a co-organizer of Network Research Seminar, a weekly interdisciplinary workshop and seminar funded by the University of Michigan.

  • I have been reviewers for CSCW Journal and conferences of CSCW, CHI, and Group.

  • I was the goalie of Tsinghua University Men’s Soccer Varsity Team back in college.

  • I like taking pictures