Research in Human Behavior, Perception, and Cognition

Human behavior is at the core of the Department's academic and research activities. Here, Human behavior spans individual cognition of information, individual behavior (such as incentives and trust), how these influence and are influenced by groups, organizations, and communities, to society and humanity as a whole in the context of information and information technology. Visualizing intricate information in a manner easy to comprehend by humans, making algorithms fair and ethical, and data accessible to individuals, groups and communities, and applying fundamental cognitive processes to the design of information technology are areas of interest in the department.

The faculty members involved in research in human-centric information are: 

  • Peter Brusilovsky (adaptive Web systems, social Web, adaptive hypermedia, etc.)
  • Na Du (human factors, computational modeling, human-centered design, analysis and design of technologies)
  • Rosta Farzan (Social Computing, Urban Informatics, Online Communities, Computer Supported Cooperative Work)
  • Morgan Frank (Computational Social Science, Labor economics and analytics),
  • James Joshi (Access control, information and cloud security, usable security)
  • Michael Lewis (Human-robot interaction, theory of mind inferences, human-agent teams)  
  • Yu-Ru Lin (human and social dynamics, computational approaches for mining and visualizing large-scale, time-varying, heterogeneous, multi-relational, and semi-structured data),
  • Martin Weiss (Techno-economic models, Radio spectrum governance, telecommunications regulation and policy, institutional use of blockchains)
  • Lingfei Wu (Geometry of thinking, future of work)