LAB REPORT
Research Supporting Peoples’ Interactions with Tech Systems
T
he Social Computing Systems (SALT) Lab focuses on systems research in social computing, seeking deep understandings of how people interact with sociotechnical computing systems. Researchers develop original designs that enable new forms of user/social interaction or impact existing user/social interaction. They also propose, develop and evaluate novel infrastructure solutions for a variety of social computing applications. Current research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Google and Syracuse University ADVANCE. Projects include:
CROWDSOURCING
CAN (Composable Accessiblity Infrastructure) The research aims to develop a lightweight utility infrastructure, CAN (Composable Accessibility Infrastructure), where software developers share functional modules and website or mobile app developers can easily find and integrate suitable accessibility modules into their sites or apps.
DPS (Public Safety) This project explores ways to improve public safety in a local community by using open crime data and crowdsourcing information.
Indoor Map The goal of the Indoor Map project is creating co-location technologies that can improve awareness about and potential uses of nearby facilities, resources and services to enhance learning on university campuses.
Community As Connection This effort provides a framework for crowdsourcing human knowledge and allowing people to share their knowledge as library resources. With local librarians as the centerpoint of resource coordination, the Lab designed a system to help promote community library events.
Emotion Map (Community Happiness) The project seeks to understand how increased awareness of selfemotions and local community emotions can help people implement different emotion regulation strategies via designing, implementing and evaluating a mobile social app.
PRIVACY AND SECURITY Accessible Authentication Studies on authentication (logging into a website) show that this task presents many challenges for people with disabilities, and this project aims to build novel authentication mechanisms that are accessible and privacy-preserving for that population. A preliminary study of the issues and development of an accessible authentication framework, with varied authentication mechanisms, is underway. (See article on page 24.)
Internet of Things (IoT) While emerging technologies such as IoT objects and systems like wearable devices, smart home appliances and drones are enabling exciting and innovative applications that can benefit people and society, they also raise important privacy and security questions. This research aims to unravel these challenges and design mechanisms to address the issues. continued on page 25 THE iSCHOOL @ SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
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innovatiONS
