Social Computing for the Research Community

This thread of research explores how social dynamics and community interactions can be leveraged for the research community. A core motivation is that social hierarchies and fear of judgment create barriers to participation in public discourse, particularly for junior members of communities like academia. Meronymous Communication introduces meronymity, a design paradigm enabling users to selectively reveal verified aspects of their identity — balancing the safety of anonymity with the credibility and context needed for meaningful engagement — and demonstrates through a field deployment that junior scholars could comfortably seek paper recommendations from senior researchers they would normally find intimidating. ComLittee reimagines literature discovery as a community-driven, author-centric process, allowing scholars to curate personal "committees" of relevant authors whose publication networks then power further discovery of papers and researchers, yielding significant gains in discovery efficiency and novelty. Social-RAG shifts from individual to group-level social grounding for AI, proposing a workflow that retrieves social signals from prior group interactions to contextualize LLM-generated messages; deployed as PaperPing in 18 Slack channels, it demonstrated that socially grounded paper recommendations foster common ground and fit naturally into existing group practices. Together, these works advance a vision where social context — from partial identity signals to community interaction histories — makes both human communication and AI generation more effective.