Jared Lorince

Biography

I'm a fourth year PhD student in cognitive science and psychology at Indiana University, Bloomington My work explores human behavior in social information environments on the Web. This largely manifests in integrating knowledge of human search and decision-making capacities with large scale data-mining and analysis methods.

My principal research project currently involves data I have crawled from the social music site Last.fm, which I am using to study collaborative tagging and music consumption patterns. Questions we are exploring include social imitation and expertise effects in tagging, whether and how users' tagging decisions are sensitive to the distribution of tags previously assigned to content, and how listening and tagging habits are connected. We are also beginning to explore methods for studying people's movement through the "music space" over time (e.g. are their listening habits broadening or narrowing, do certain artists serve as gateways to others, etc.). Our hope is that this will inform improved recommendation algorithms that are sensitive to the trajectory a user has taken (or wishes to take) in their listening habits, and can ultimately apply to other information domains (e.g. academic paper recommendations).

But that's just the blurb version. Beyond tagging, I'm interested in: big data analysis, web mining, social signaling online, path-following in physical and digital environments, game design, motivational factors in online communities, gamification, recommendation systems, multi-agent simulation, tools for connecting the academic and non-academic world...and plenty of other stuff. If any of that sounds cool to you, too, let's talk about it!