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Home > Research > Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) > Projects
SI REU Summer Program: Projects
Below are the research projects from the summer 2008 REU program. Projects for the 2009 REU program will be available soon.
Social Identity and Mechanism Design
Professor Yan Chen, School of Information, U-M
Social identity is commonly defined as a person's sense of self derived from perceived membership in social groups. While standard economic analysis focuses on individual-level incentives in decision-making, group identity has been shown to be a central concept in understanding such phenomena as ethnic and racial conflicts, discrimination, political campaigns, and education in social psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political science.
We propose to use the experimental approach to systematically study the effects of social identity on individual preferences and how the mechanism designer can utilize group identity as one of the design variables in designing the optimal contract in a diverse work force.
We also explore the effects of social identity on equilibrium selection. Our studies draw on methods from experimental economics and social psychology and aim to capture causal effects of identity on economic decision making.
One to two REU students will participate in the research project gaining experience in all phases of the process from conducting literature reviews, to the design and implementation of the laboratory experiments, data analysis, and writing research papers. Professor Chen and her doctoral student mentor will closely supervise the REU students. REU students will participate in their weekly Behavioral and Experimental Lab meetings throughout the ten-week period.
REU students should (currently) be a sophomore or junior, with some prior programming experience. Students should have taken at least one programming course and one course in statistics. They will be expected to learn z-tree (a programming language for economic experiments), to program for experiments and to conduct data analysis.
Rearchitecting Online Conversation
Professor Paul Resnick, School of Information, U-M
One or two undergraduate students will work on the research project "Pivots, Trackers, and Recommenders: Making Online Conversations Simultaneously Serve Multiple Audiences."
The goal of the project is to create an alternative architecture for online conversation that improves on some of the features of online forums. In particular, the new architecture will enable a better integration of conversation with information objects, and enable a single space to appear on-topic to newcomers yet still permit social interaction among regulars.
The student(s) will help develop the software implementing the new architecture and prepare it for field trials in online communities. The software to be developed with be an add-on module or modules for Drupal, a popular open-source CMS.
The student(s) can expect to learn about recommender systems, social computing, information retrieval, and Drupal development, as well as practice programming skills. Requirements: PHP, Javascript.
For more information about the project, please contact Daniel Zhou at mrzhou@umich.edu.
Or for background about the project, see www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/chi08/ and portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1057126.
Trading Agent Competition
Professor Michael Wellman, Computer Science and Engineering, U-M;
Professor Daniel Grosu, Computer Science, Wayne State University
The Trading Agent Competition (TAC) is an international forum designed to promote and encourage high quality research into the trading agent problem. TAC tournaments have been held annually since 2000.
TAC provides a forum for researchers to evaluate programmed trading techniques in a market scenario by competing with agents from other design groups. Over the past six years, it has attracted participants from many institutions from dozens of countries around the world.
Two to four REU students will participate in the TAC teams each summer, with half of them joining the University of Michigan team supervised by Professor Wellman, and the other half joining the WSU team supervised by Professor Grosu. The students will take responsibility in the design and implementation of trading agents to enter the annual international competition. The faculty and doctoral student advisors will closely supervise the student research activities.
As in the past, our undergraduate students will be expected to participate as co-authors in the writing of the academic papers to be published in peer-reviewed journals. Some programming experience preferred (particular language not essential).
Social and Transactional Networks in Virtual Worlds
Assistant Professor Lada Adamic, School of Information, U-M
The study seeks understand the formation and co-evolution of social networks and markets in a virtual world. The particular world participants will study is that of Second Life, where nearly everything is designed and constructed by the users themselves.
The project will examine whether a user's position in the social network and group affiliation network correlates with their level of engagement. We will also study the diffusion of purchase patterns in the group and social networks.
One or two REU students will work with Professor Adamic and an SI Ph.D. student. REU students should have programming experience, preferably Java, and should be interested in one or more of the following: information visualization, human-computer interaction, online communities, or economics.
Cyber Trust: Incentive-Centered Technology Design for Home Computer Security
Professor Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, School of Information, U-M
Home and personal computers are now one of the most serious sources of network security problems. Hackers increasingly exploit the millions of these machines to build "botnets": networks of home machines that hackers compromise in order to remotely control them.
Our project focuses on ordinary, non-professional computer users and how they use (or don't use!) security technologies to protect their home and personal computers.
Undergraduates working with us would participate in one or both of two research activities. For one activity, we conduct in-depth interviews of home computer users to understand what they understand about hacker and virus threats, and what they do to manage computer security.
In the second activity we are designing, building, and testing a new security technology that may help home computer users improve their security. This new technology uses ideas from economics, psychology, and social networking to encourage users to share information about security with each other.
This project can accommodate two REU students. One person must be comfortable with using a computer and familiar with typical home computer security tools like anti-virus programs, anti-spyware, and personal firewalls.
The second person must have basic programming skills in a high-level language like Python or Ruby, and user-interface programming skills are a plus. Student must also be willing to conduct interviews and must be familiar with typical home computer security tools like anti-virus programs, anti-spyware, and personal firewalls.
Bidding Behavior in Government Procurement Auctions
Mark McCabe, Visiting Assistant Professor, School of Information, U-M
This project makes use of a unique dataset assembled during a 2007 federal and state antitrust investigation of a merger between the two largest providers of school bus transportation services in the United States. Our focus will be on auctions for school bus contracts conducted by school districts throughout the state of NJ over the past decade. Using the data, we plan to address a number of questions including: 1. How many bidders are required to achieve a competitive outcome? 2. If the answer to (1) is "too many!" can we determine whether firms are (tacitly) colluding to keep prices high? 3. Have past mergers raised prices? 4. Given NJ's approach to auctions, is there room for improvement, and if so, what might alternative auction mechanisms look like?
The student(s) will work closely with Professor McCabe and an SI doctoral student. Depending on their skills and interests, they could assist with data collection/processing, literature reviews, programming and/or econometric analysis. We continue to collect data from the folks in NJ (with the assistance of its Department of Education and Attorney General) and anticipate frequent interaction with officials there.
Ideally the student(s) will have an understanding of basic econometrics. Knowledge of a specific econometric software package is helpful but not required. Much of the data analysis will be conducted using MatLab and Stata. Therefore an ability to write basic code for MatLab/Stata or experience with programming in general is desirable. Good people skills would also be helpful – we expect the student(s) to manage some of the data collection efforts with various school districts.
Social Networking Tools to Enable Collaboration in the Tobacco Surveillance, Epidemiology and Evaluation Network
Professor Thomas Finholt, School of Information, UM
The project undertakes a pioneering effort at incorporating social networking tools to enhance collaboration among members of the Tobacco Surveillance, Epidemiology, and Evaluation Network using the TobacSIG cyberinfrastructure. The project brings together researchers in information science, social science, and public health who have established long standing collaborations with our government partners on the development of networks to support transdisciplinary research in public health. The researchers have assisted our government partners in formulating the challenges and envisioning solutions. Hence the research team is will positioned to leverage the substantial financial and human resources being invested by NCI and its partner government agencies in the TobacSIG cyberinfrastructure.
Each year one to two REU students will participate in this project. They will be responsible for the design and implementation of laboratory experiments which tests and compare various incentive mechanisms associated with the user referring tools (year 1). In the second and third summer, REU students will be conducting field experiments comparing the effects of the user referring tool to alternative venues of information search, such as Google search and Yahoo! Answers. We plan to conduct the field experiments using tobacco researchers to increase the external validity. REU students will participate in Professor Finholt’s weekly CREW seminar during the summer to discuss and present the research design and results. They will also be expected to participate in the writing phase as co-authors.
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