January 14, 2021 11am-12:30pm January 14, 2021 11:00 AM to
January 14, 2021 12:30 PM Virtual Meeting
Talk Abstract: A key challenge of science policy is to achieve sustained benefit from scientific grantmaking. In this presentation, I will provide a framework for thinking about sustainability in scientific software projects, based on empirical studies of development and use of software in science. The framework starts by asking: what is it that causes sustainability problems? Over time, software declines in scientific usefulness, driven by four factors: a moving scientific frontier, technological change, friction in building software, friction in using software, and, least appreciated, change in the software ecosystem sounding a component. These factors drive a need for work; in response, we can try to suppress the drivers, try to reduce the amount of work needed, or attract sufficient resources able to undertake th
December 21, 2020
What makes people good at having conversations? In a recent paper, Cornell researchers explored conversations on a crisis text service in order to figure out how to answer that question.
“The problem we always came up with was that we never knew if the things we observed were correlations, or if they could actually provide useful information to inform how the platform assigns counselors,” said Justine Zhang, doctoral student in information science and first author of “Quantifying the Causal Effects of Conversational Tendencies.”
The paper was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, held virtually Oct. 17-21.