Paul Resnick

Professor
University of Michigan
School of Information
314 West Hall/ 3246C SI North
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1092
presnick@umich.edu

Research Projects |
Courses |
Interests and Activities:   professional | personal
Papers |
Bio
Blog
 

Office hours Winter 2008:  Fridays 1-5, 409 West Hall.

   Research Interests and Projects

 

Convening Technologies

I am interested in Meetup.com and other "convening technologies" that help introduce people to other and/or coordinate their convenings. In the summer of 2004, research assistants are attending Meetup events in seven cities around the U.S. (Joint project with Bob Kraut at CMU, and Bob Putnam, Rob Sampson, and Tom Sander at Harvard.) We would like to  understand who goes, what happens, and what the social capital side effects. We would also like to be able to characterize the novel technical and organizational elements that are at work and which might be recombined in different ways in different services.

RideNow: Dynamic Ride Sharing

I am interested in ride sharing services that dynamically match riders with rides.  (Joint work with Marc Smith at Microsoft and Lorrie Cranor at CMU). A paper on Impersonal SocioTechnical Capital puts the idea in context. I prepared a scenario document, in draft form, for the UTEP Symposium in winter 2003. We're planning small-scale trials in Fall 2004. An independent effort in the same vein, in the Bay Area is starting a trial on July 19, 2004.

CommunityLab: Motivating Contribution the the Public Good in On-line Communities

We are drawing on theories and data from social psychology and public goods economics to drive design decisions about on-line communities with the goal of increasing participants' contributions to the communal good. (Joint work with Bob Kraut, Sara Kiesler, Yan Chen, Loren Terveen, John Riedl, and Joe Konstan. Funded by NSF under Grant No. 0325837.) 

The first paper from this project, describing campaigns to try to encourage members of MovieLens to rate more, will be presented at the CSCW 2004 conference. As predicted by theory, individuals contributed more when they were reminded of their uniqueness and when they were given specific and moderately challenging goals, but other predictions were not borne out. In particular, a puzzling result was that reminding individuals that their ratings help either themselves or others prompted less rather than more rating.

Recommender and Reputation Systems

A reputation system gives people information about others' past performance. It can enhance an on-line interaction environment by:

• helping people decide who to trust;
• encouraging people to be more trustworthy;
• discouraging those who are not trustworthy from participating.

 

Papers coming from this stream of research are listed in the papers section, below. (This project is joint work with Richard Zeckhauser. Funded by NSF under Grant No. 0308006.)

Researchers from a number of fields have taken an interest in this topic. A web site with links to people and papers provides a focal point for this nascent research network.

My remarks on the implications of recommender and reputation systems for the future of electronic publishing appear in the National Academies Press report on, "Electronic Scientific, Technical, and Medical Journal Publishing and Its Implications". 

 

 

Evaluation of Internet Filters

Filtering software cannot perfectly discriminate between allowed and forbidden content, resulting in two types of errors. First, under-blocking occurs when content is not blocked that should be restricted. Second, over-blocking occurs when content is blocked that should not have been restricted. Steps can be taken to reduce the frequency of errors, and to reduce their costs (e.g., providing easy appeals processes and quick overrides and corrections) but some errors are inevitable. Most empirical studies of error rates have suffered from methodological flaws in sample selection, classification procedures, or implementation of blocking tests. In 2002, we conducted a study for the Kaiser Family Foundation to examine the extent of over-blocking of health information and under-blocking of pornography. A paper about methods for conducting and reporting such studies will appear in the September 2004 issue of Communications of the ACM.

Courses

Winter 2008:

SI684/884: e-communities

SI631: Content Management Systems (PEP Workshop project course)

Fall 2006:

SI502 Networked Computing: Storage, Communication, and Processing (Ctools site only; no public site)

Winter 2007:

SI505: Drupal Boot Camp

SI631: Content Management Systems (PEP Workshop project course)

Fall 2006:

Recommender Systems

SI575: Community Information Corps Seminar

Winter 2006:

SI684/884: e-communities

Fall 2005:

SI540: Understanding Networked Computing  (2005 placeout information)

SI544: Statistics

Winter 2005:

SI575: Community Information Corps Seminar

SI684/884: e-communities

Fall 2004:

SI540: Understanding Networked Computing

SI644: Statistics

Fall 2003:

CMU CSCW/Online Communities course (co-taught with Bob Kraut)

Winter 2003:

SI684/884: e-communities

Fall 2002:

SI540: Understanding Networked Computing (no longer available on-line)

Winter 2002:

SI598/698: Dot.Org Incubator (Practical Engagement Workshop)

SI575: Community Information Corps Seminar

SI684: e-communities

 

Fall 2001:

SI598/698: Dot.Org Incubator (Practical Engagement Workshop)
SI540: Understanding Networked Computing (no longer available on-line)

SI575: Community Information Corps Seminar

 

Winter 2001:

SI575: Community Information Corps Seminar

Fall 2000:

SI540: Understanding Networked Computing (no longer available on-line)

SI575: Community Information Corps Seminar

Professional Interests and Activities

In 1999, I started the Community Information Corps at the University of Michigan School of Information. It brings together faculty and students who are studying how to organize information flows for community and public purposes. With support from the Packard Foundation, the Alliance for Community Technology and the Microsoft Foundation, we have offered financial assistance and professional development opportunities to alumni who pursue public interest careers. Salary supplements are also available for public interest summer internships.

Personal Interests and Activities

Music

I play the fiddle and guitar, and sing, mostly country and folk styles.

Sports

Tennis (USTA 4.0). Ultimate frisbee.

Papers

• Zhou, Daniel Xiaodan, Oostendorp, Nathan, Hess, Michael, and Resnick, Paul. Conversation Pivots and Double Pivots. Proceedings of CHI08 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Florence, Italy.

• Resnick, P. and Sami, R. The Influence Limiter: Provably Manipulation-Resistant Recommender Systems. Proceedings of ACM RecSys 07 Conference on Recommender Systems. Minneapolis, MN. pp. 25-32.

• Lampe, C., Johnston, E. and Resnick, P. Follow the Reader: Filtering Comments on Slashdot. Proceedings of CHI 07 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. San Jose, CA, 2007. pp. 1253-1262.

• Hansen, Derek, Ackerman, Mark, Resnick, Paul, and Munson, Sean. Virtual Community Maintenance with a Collaborative Repository. Proceedings of ASIST 2007.

• Friedman, Eric, Resnick, Paul, and Sami, Rahul. Manipulation-Resistant Reputation Systems. Chapter 27 in Algorithmic Game Theory. Edited by Noam Nisan, Tim Roughgarden, Eva Tardos, and Vijay Vazirani. Cambridge University Press. 2007.

• Resnick, Paul, “Decomposing a Design Space”. In HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community. Edited by Thomas Erickson and David W. McDonald. MIT Press. 2007.

• Rashid, Al Mamunur, Ling, Kimberly, Tassone, Regina D, Resnick, Paul, Kraut, Robert, and Riedl, John. Motivating Participation by Displaying the Value of Contribution. In Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006, pp. 955-958.

• Resnick, Paul, Zeckhauser, Richard, Swanson, John, and Kate Lockwood. The Value of Reputation on eBay: A Controlled Experiment. Experimental Economics. Volume 9, Issue 2, Jun 2006, Page 79-101.
• Wash, Rick, Hemphill, Libby, and Resnick, Paul. Design Decisions in the RideNow Project. Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work, pp. 132-135.
• Khopkar, Tapan, Li, Xin, and Resnick, Paul. Self-Selection, Slipping, Salvaging, Slacking, and Stoning: the Impacts of Negative Feedback at eBay. Proceedings of ACM EC 05 Conference on Electronic Commerce. Vancouver, Canada. 2005, pp. 223-231.
• Miller, Nolan, Resnick, Paul, and Richard Zeckhauser. Eliciting Honest Feedback: The Peer Prediction Method. Management Science, Sept. 2005. 51(9), pp. 1359-1373.
• Horrigan, John, Garrett, Kelly and Resnick, Paul, "The Internet and Democratic Debate," Pew Internet and American Life Project, 10/27/04, 2004.
• Beenen, Gerard, Ling, Kimberly, Wang, Xiaoqing, Chang, Klarissa, Frankowski, Dan, Resnick, Paul, and Robert E Kraut. Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities. In Proceedings of ACM CSCW 2004 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Chicago, IL. 2004. A revised and expanded version appears as:
  Ling, K., Beenen, G., Ludford, P., Wang, X., Chang, K., Cosley, D., Frankowski, D., Terveen, L., Rashid, A. M., Resnick, P., and Kraut, R. (2005). Using social psychology to motivate contributions to online communities. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(4), article 10.
• Lampe, Cliff and Paul Resnick. Slash(dot) and Burn: Distributed Moderation in a Large Online Conversation Space. In Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vienna Austria. 2004.
• Resnick, Paul. Impersonal Sociotechnical Capital, ICTs, and Collective Action Among Strangers. in, Transforming Enterprise, William Dutton, Brian Kahin, Ramon O'Callaghan, and Andrew Wyckoff, Eds. MIT Press 2004.
• Resnick, Paul. Where Locality Meets Virtuality. In Making the Net Work: Sustainable Development in a Digital Society, edited by  Vidhya Alakeson, Tim Aldrich, James Goodman, and Britt Jorgensen. Xeris Publishing 2003.
• Resnick, Paul, Hansen, Derek, and Richardson, Caroline. Calculating Error Rates for Filtering Software. Communications of the ACM, September 2004.
• Hansen, Derek, Derry, Holly, Resnick, Paul, and Caroline Richardson, Adolescents Searching for Health Information on the Internet: An Observational Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research 2003. 5(4):e25.
• Richardson, Caroline, Resnick, Paul, Hansen, Derek, Derry, Holly, and Vicky Rideout, Does Pornography-Blocking Software Block Access to Health Information on the Internet? Journal of the American Medical Association, 2002. 288(22).
• Resnick, Paul and Vishant Shah. Photo Directories: A Tool for Organizing Sociability in Neighborhoods and Organizations. Working paper, September 2002.
• Resnick, Paul and Richard Zeckhauser. Trust Among Strangers in Internet Transactions: Empirical Analysis of eBay's Reputation System. The Economics of the Internet and E-Commerce. Michael R. Baye, editor. Volume 11 of Advances in Applied Microeconomics. Amsterdam, Elsevier Science. 2002. pp. 127-157.
• Resnick, Paul. Beyond Bowling Together: SocioTechnical Capital. Chapter 29 in "HCI in the New Millenium", edited by John M. Carroll. Addison-Wesley. 2002, pages 247-272.
• Boyte, Harry, and Paul Resnick, with Peter Levine, Robert Wachbroit, and Lew Friedland. White Paper: Civic Extension for the Information Age. Draft of July 23, 2001.
• A. Dieberger, P. Dourish, K. Höök, P. Resnick and A. Wexelblat. Social navigation: techniques for building more usable systems. Interactions, 7(6), November-December 2000, pages 36-45.
• Resnick, Paul, Zeckhauser, Richard, Friedman, Eric, and Kuwabara, Ko. Reputation Systems. Communications of the ACM, 43(12), December 2000, pages 45-48.
• Lessig, Lawrence and Paul Resnick. Zoning Speech on the Internet: a Legal and Technical Model. Michigan Law Review 98(2): 395-431.
• Friedman, Eric and Paul Resnick. The Social Cost of Cheap Pseudonyms. Journal of Economics and Management Strategy 10(2): 173-199
• Resnick, Paul.  PICS and Intellectual Freedom FAQ. Reprinted in Cyberlaw: Cases and Materials on the Internet, Digital Intellectual Property and Electronic Commerce, pp. 269-277.
• Cranor, Lorrie and Paul Resnick. Technology Inventory (for Internet Online Summit: Focus on Children).
• Cranor, Lorrie and Paul Resnick. Protocols for Automated Negotiations with Buyer Anonymity and Seller Reputations. Netnomics, 2000. 2(1): p. 1-23.
• Avery, Chris, Resnick, Paul, and Zeckhauser, Richard, The Market for Evaluations. American Economic Review 89(3): 564-584.
• Chu, Yang-hua, Joan Feigenbaum, Brian LaMacchia, Paul Resnick and Martin Strauss (1997). REFEREE: Trust Management for Web Applications, The World Wide Web Journal, special issue on "Web Security: a Matter of Trust," 1997, 2 (3), pp. 127-139.
• Blaze, Matt, Feigenbaum, Joan, Resnick, Paul, and Strauss, Martin, Managing Trust in an Information-Labeling System, European Transactions on Telecommunications, 8 (1997), pp. 491-501.
• Resnick, Paul. Filtering Information on the Internet. Paul Resnick. Scientific American, March 1997, pp. 106-108.
• Resnick, Paul and Varian, Hal. Recommender Systems, introduction to special section of Communications of the ACM, March 1997, vol. 40(3).
• Resnick, Paul and Miller, James, The CDA's Silver Lining. Wired, 1996, vol. 4(8), pp. 109-110.
• Resnick, Paul and Miller, James, PICS: Internet Access Controls Without Censorship, Communications of the ACM, 1996, vol. 39(10), pp. 87-93.
• Rekhter, Yakov, Resnick, Paul and Bellovin, Steve, Financial Incentives for Route Aggregation and Efficient Address Utilization in the Internet , Proceedings of the 1996 Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, Solomons, MD. Reprinted in, Coordinating the Internet, Brian Kahin and James Keller, eds. MIT Press.
• Resnick, Paul, Zeckhauser, Richard and Avery, Chris, Roles for Electronic Brokers, in Toward a Competitive Telecommunication Industry: Selected Papers from the 1994 Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, G. W. Brock, Ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995, pp. 289-304.
• Resnick, Paul and Virzi, Robert, "Relief from the Audio Interface Blues: An Expanded Spectrum of Menu, List, and Form Styles," ACM Transactions on CHI, 1995, vol. 2(2), pp. 146-177.
• Resnick, P., Iacovou, N., Suchak, M., Bergstrom, P. and Riedl, J. (1994). GroupLens: An Open Architecture for Collaborative Filtering of Netnews. In CSCW '94: Conference on Computer Supported Coorperative Work (Chapel Hill, 1994), ACM, pp. 175-186.
• Resnick, P. Phone-Based CSCW: Tools and Trials. ACM Transactions on Information Systems. October 1993, (1993).
• Davis, R. and Resnick, P. Multiple Dimensions of Generalization in Model-Based Troubleshooting. In AAAI 93 (Washington, DC, 1993), American Association for Artificial Intelligence, pp. 160-166.
• Resnick, P. A User Programmable Phone-Based Event Calendar. In AVIOS '93 (San Jose, CA, 1993), The American Voice Input/Output Society.
• Resnick, P. HyperVoice: A Phone-Based CSCW Platform. In CSCW '92: Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (Toronto, 1992), ACM, pp. 218-225.
• Resnick, P. and Virzi, R. A. Skip and Scan: Cleaning Up Telephone Interfaces. In CHI '92: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Monterey, CA, 1992), ACM, pp. 419-426.
• Virzi, R. A., Resnick, P. and Ottens, D. Skip and Scan Telephone Menus: User Performance as a Function of Experience. In Proceedings of the Human Factors Society (Santa Monica, CA, 1992), Human Factors Society, pp. 211-215.
• Resnick, P. The Smart Fast Forward Button. In Proceedings of the American Voice Input/Output Society (Minneapolis, MN, 1992), pp. 323-329.
• Resnick, P. and King, M. The Rainbow Pages: Building Community with Voice Technology. In Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing (Boston, MA, 1990), pp. 2-13.

PICS Technical Specification Documents

Evans, Christopher, Feather, Clive  D. W., Hopmann, Alex, Presler-Marshall, Martin and Resnick, Paul, PICSRules 1.1 W3C, Dec. 1997.

Miller, Jim, Paul Resnick and David Singer (1996). “Rating Services and Rating Systems (and Their Machine-Readable Descriptions),” The World Wide Web Journal 1(4): 23-43. Available on-line at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/PICS/services.html

Krauskopf, Tim, Jim Miller, Paul Resnick and Win Treese (1996) “Label Syntax and Communication Protocols,” The World Wide Web Journal 1(4): 45-69. Available on-line at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/PICS/labels.html
 

  Bio

Paul Resnick is a Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. He previously worked as a researcher at AT&T Labs and AT&T Bell Labs, and as an Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He received the master's and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan.

Professor Resnick's research focuses on SocioTechnical Capital, productive social relations that are enabled by the ongoing use of information and communication technology. His current projects include analyzing and designing reputation systems, ride share coordination services, and applying principles from economics and social psychology to the design of on-line communities.

Resnick was a pioneer in the field of recommender systems (sometimes called collaborative filtering or social filtering). Recommender systems guide people to interesting materials based on recommendations from other people.  His articles have appeared in Scientific American, Wired, Communications of the ACM, The American Economic Review, Management Science, and many other publications. 

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