Keynote Speaker

John Riedl

Professor, Department of Computer Science
University of Minnesota


"Altruism, Cooperation, and Destruction on The Social Web"

Many online communities are emerging that, like Wikipedia, bring people together to build valuable long-lasting artifacts in peer production communities. The emergent behavior of millions of people working together with only the power structures they can evolve themselves is remarkable. We will seek to understand the causes of the successes and failures of these communities by looking at examples of both. What is the nature of people's participation in peer production systems? What are their motives? In what ways is their behavior destructive instead of constructive? How can computer agents interact with the humans to encourage the positive contribtions, and damp down the negative? We will explore these questions in the context of a wide variety of the most successful Social Web systems.

Biography:

John Riedl is a professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota. John's areas of speciality include collaborative filtering, systems, information filtering and online social networks. In 2006, he was named a Senior Member of the IEEE and also won the Best Paper Award at the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Conference. Riedl has also received the Commerce Technology Award, The MIT Sloan School Award for Innovation in E-Commerce, and at least half a dozen teaching awards. John has authored more than 50 publications, including one book, journal and conference papers, short articles and book chapters. He is an Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on the Web. John's research focus is on collaborative systems that support human interaction through computer systems.