CS's Hecht, Vincent, & Johnson's Research Featured in New York Times Article
They examine Wikipedia's critical role in the Internet ecosystem and in intelligent technologies.
The exciting research of Prof. Brent Hecht, Nicholas Vincent (TSB Ph.D.) and Isaac Johnson (CS Ph.D.) is highlighted in a recent New York Times article, titled, "YouTube May Add to the Burdens of Humble Wikipedia" examining Wikipedia's critical role in the Internet ecosystem and in intelligent technologies.
Prof. Hecht, who has studied Wikipedia’s relationships with tech companies and online communities, states, “The degree to which the Wikipedia data has informed computer science is pretty astonishing. Wikipedia definitely creates massively more value for these companies than they put in."
Nicholas Vincent is a first-year TSB Ph.D. student and Isaac Johnson is a fourth-year computer science PhD student are advised by Dr. Brent Hecht at the People, Space, & Algorithms (PSA) Research Group at Northwestern University. Vincent researches algorithmic and economic dependencies between free online content and major intelligent technologies. Johnson primarily researches how we might design algorithms to account for geography and associated biases in data and variation in human behavior, while also implementing and experimenting with various algorithms (e.g., geolocation, vehicle routing, sentiment analysis), exploring how they perform for different populations and seeking to incorporate in and optimize on more human-centric metrics.
For more information reguarding the team's work, check out their 2017 #ICWSM paper on Wikipedia's relationship with Google Search and their #chi2018 paper on Wikipedia's relationship with Reddit and Stack Overview.