My research interests are highly interdisciplinary. They broadly lie in Human Computer Interaction, Computer-Mediated Communication, Human Computation, and Social Computing. My thesis work focuses on the domain of Social and Interactive Television. I've also been known to dabble in applied Machine Learning and Computational Linguistics. In my early graduate school days, I dabbled in Networking research (and ultimately concluded that people were more interesting).
I am particularly interested in how people use the Internet to create and maintain social relationships through participation in shared activities online. My thesis focuses on the social aspects of collaborative online video watching, the activity of chatting with others while watching videos online. It focuses on understanding the distraction present in multitasking between watching videos and chatting, and it contains concrete design recommendations for large-scale broadcasts that attract audiences of millions of simultaneous viewers. My thesis demonstrates that chatting while watching is fun albeit distracting, that it improves momentary feelings of sociability, and that chat data can be used to learn information about video content, such as tags and ratings, which are of an equivalent quality to hand-labeled data.