Associate Professor of Information Science, Cornell University

Dan Cosley is an Associate Professor of information science at Cornell University who does research around human-computer interaction and social media, as well as a rotating program officer in NSF’s Cyber-Human Systems program.  His high-level research goal is to build systems that leverage people’s pre-existing behavior in digital media to improve individual well-being and community outcomes.  These include SuggestBot, a recommender system for Wikipedia editors to find useful work to do, and Pensieve, a tool for reminiscing and reflecting on the past through social media.  In doing this, he studies how people use systems to understand themselves and their relationships, and how our behavior is shaped both by other people and by the systems themselves.  This work is supported by NSF and rooted in the PhD in computer science he received in 2006 under the guidance of advisors John Riedl and Loren Terveen from the University of Minnesota.