Instructors

Mark Ackerman
Ph.D, Information Technologies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Associate Professor of Information, School of Information
Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering

Ackerman’s research focuses on privacy, organizational memory or collaborative information access, collective information reuse, and online communities. He is part of the SocialWorlds research group that focuses on the interplay of the social world with computational systems. Ackerman is interested in co-design spaces — places where you need to consider how to incorporate elements of the social world within software systems (such as with computer-supported cooperative work systems) and also consider how systems will affect their social settings in return. His research requires a dual emphasis on both the technology and the social structures of its use. He is a member of the distinguished CHI Academy of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Lada Adamic
Ph.D, Applied Physics, Stanford University
Assistant Professor of Information, School of Information

Adamic’s research focuses on information dynamics in networks: how information diffuses, how it can be found, and how it influences the evolution of a network’s structure. Before coming to the University of Michigan, she worked in Hewlett-Packard’s Information Dynamics Lab on research projects relating to networks constructed from large data sets. These projects included mining the medical literature for gene-disease connections, tracking and modeling information flow in E-mail and blog networks, modeling search processes on real-world social networks, and building expertise-finding systems.

Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason
Ph.D, Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Professor of Information and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, School of Information
Arthur W. Burks Collegiate Professor of Information and Computer Science
Professor of Public Policy, School of Public Policy
Professor of Economics, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts

MacKie-Mason was the founding director of STIET (a research program for Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions) at the University of Michigan. His research and teaching combines economics with computer science and psychology (cognitive, and increasingly social). He addresses principles of design and performance for information technologies and digital information content. Recently, his focus has been incentive-centered design — design of information systems and services that takes into account the behavior of autonomous, motivated and often strategic humans. As principal for the consulting firm ApplEcon, MacKie-Mason also studies competition policy and antitrust, especially for technology-related industries.

Paul Resnick
Ph.D, Electrial Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Professor of Information, School of Information

Resnick coordinates the Social Computing specialization at the School of Information. His research focuses on sociotechnical capital, productive social relations that are enabled by the ongoing use of information and communication technology. His current research is on manipulation-resistance in recommender systems and on ensuring diversity in news aggregators. He is co-editing a book on the design of online communities based on mining the results of research in economics and social psychology. Resnick was a pioneer in the field of recommender systems (sometimes called collaborative filtering or social filtering), beginning work on this topic in the early 1990s. His articles have appeared in Scientific American, Wired, Communications of the ACM, The American Economic Review, Management Science, and many other publications.

Brian Kellner
MS, Management, Colorado Tech
Vice President of Products, NewsGator Technologies

Kellner is responsible for overall product management at NewsGator. He has extensive experience designing and developing enterprise social computing and RSS products and has helped hundreds of companies realize the business benefits of social computing. Kellner has held product or development management positions for more than a dozen years. Most recently he was vice president of enterprise products for Webroot Software.

Laura Farrelly
MBA, Northwestern University
Vice President of Marketing, NewsGator Technologies

Farrelly is responsible for demand generation, marketing communications, and development of social computing education tools. In her current role, Farrelly has extensive experience in helping companies develop the business case for social computing using an ROI tool that she created. She has held senior-level marketing and product management positions for more than 10 years. Most recently she was vice president of marketing at First Advantage SafeRent.