CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar   (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design)

Fridays 11:30am-12:30pm PT · Gates B3 · Open to the public
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Mark Ackerman
University of Michigan
A tentative mea culpa - a look backwards to help the next generation of CSCW researchers
April 18, 2025

In this talk, I will survey two research efforts of mine that began with best intentions, but slipped sideways into having problematic (if not downright negative) effects in the world. I will discuss my activities in the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) as part of a World Wide Web effort and my activities in expertise sharing. I do this partially as a mea culpa, but also to show the considerable caution that researchers must try to have. I will also consider the role of regulation and governance in the United States, as well as the canonical argument that we cannot hamper technical innovation. I promise to end on a happier note by considering how viewing computing as an socio-technical problem has been a significant intellectual step.

Mark Ackerman is the George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction and a Professor in the School of Information and in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His major research area is Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), primarily Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). He has published widely in HCI and CSCW, investigating expertise sharing (including misinformation), collaborative information access, online knowledge communities, medical settings, and pervasive environments. Mark is a member of the CHI Academy (HCI Fellow) and an ACM Fellow. Previously, Mark was a faculty member at the University of California, Irvine, and a research scientist at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (now CSAIL). Before becoming an academic, Mark led the development of the first home banking system, had three Billboard Top-10 games for the Atari 2600, and worked on the X Window System's first user-interface widget set. Mark has degrees from the University of Chicago, Ohio State, and MIT.