Apr 27th Meeting

First Presenter: Michael Yudelson
Topic: Comparison of 3 Paper Sharing Systems (CoPE, CUL, Comtella)

Michael compared three similar system in the purpose to share papers - CoPE, CiteULike, and Comtella. He compared them from various aspects such as support of community, navigation and interactivity, along with demonstration of each system. After his presentation, he collected questionnaires asking opinions about paper sharing system and explained the results. Privacy is important and quality and easy of use is also necessary to users. The discussion about what makes a certain system superior to others was followed. In order to attract world, the new functionality to meet users' needs like the CiteUlike case and usability should be considered as well.

Second Presenter: Rosta Farzan
Topic: 'Social' Systems: Designing Digital Systems that Support Social Intelligence

Rosta made a presentation about a paper regarding how to design a system to support social intelligence. Using social proxy, the authors provided several visualizations to show activities happened in online chat rooms. The information about the presence and activities can help create coherent behavior comprising social intelligence. In our system, Dr. Brusilovsky pointed that it is necessary to share the social activities happening inside of our system and the information about who contribute what in the system. Dr. Vassileva suggested that using Comtella it was motivational to users to see the effect of their actions.