Hi! I'm Ruogu. I am a 5th year PhD student at Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. My advisor is Prof. Sara Kiesler .
My research is about understanding how people share information and supporting better information sharing. More information transparency could facilitate collaboration and innovation. However, people do not always know what is the right information to share with others and may not be willing to share some information because of privacy and security concerns. My research about Internet anonymity and information sharing in collaborative work starts to investigate these problems.
Before entering CMU, I got my Master's degree in Human Factors from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I worked with Prof. Wai-Tat Fu there on information search and social tagging.
I was born in Xi'an, Shaanxi, China. I came to United States in 2008. Before that I did my undergraduate study at Tsinghua University, and worked at the Institute of Human Factors and Ergonomics.
In my spare time, I enjoy watching movie, travelling, and swimming.
2014
Ruogu Kang, Stephanie Brown, Laura Dabbish and Sara Kiesler. 2014. Privacy Attitudes of Mechanical Turk Workers and the U.S. Public. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security(SOUPS) . USENIX, 37-49. [Full paper]
Ruogu Kang , Aimee Kane, Sara Kiesler. 2014. Teammate Inaccuracy Blindness: When Information Sharing Tools Hinder Collaborative Analysis. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 797-806. [Full paper]
Aimee Kane, Ruogu Kang, Elise Carter, Sara Kiesler. 2014. Overcoming Teammate Inaccuracy Blindness in Remote Asynchronous Collaborative Analysis, Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research Conference (INGroup '14), Raleigh, NC, USA. [Presentation]
2013
Ruogu Kang, Stephanie Brown, and Sara Kiesler. 2013. Why Do People Seek Anonymity on the Internet? Informing Policy and Design. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13) . ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 2657-2666. [Full paper]
Ruogu Kang, Aimee Kane, Sara Kiesler. 2013. When Information Sharing Tools Help or Hinder Collaborative Analysis. Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research Conference (INGroup '13), Atlanta, GA, USA. [Presentation]
2012
Ruogu Kang and Sara Kiesler. 2012. Do collaborators' annotations help or hurt asynchronous analysis. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 123-126. [Poster]
Colleen Stuart, Laura Dabbish, Sara Kiesler, Peter Kinnaird, and Ruogu Kang. 2012. Social transparency in networked information exchange: a theoretical framework. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 451-460. [Full paper]
2010
Ruogu Kang, Wai-Tat Fu, and Thomas George Kannampallil. 2010. Exploiting knowledge-in-the-head and knowledge-in-the-social-web: effects of domain expertise on exploratory search in individual and social search environments. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 393-402. [Full paper]
Ruogu Kang and Wai-Tat Fu. 2010. Exploratory information search by domain experts and novices. In Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces (IUI '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 329-332. [Poster]
Wai-Tat Fu, Thomas Kannampallil, Ruogu Kang, and Jibo He. 2010. Semantic imitation in social tagging. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact (TOCHI). 17(3), Article 12 (July 2010), 37 pages.[Journal]
Qin Gao, Yusen Dai, Zao Fan, Ruogu Kang. 2010. Understanding factors affecting perceived sociability of social software. Computers in Human Behavior, 26(6), 1846-1861.[Journal]
Wai-Tat Fu, Thomas G. Kannampallil, and Ruogu Kang. 2010. Facilitating exploratory search by model-based navigational cues. In Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces (IUI '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 199-208. [Full paper]
2009
Wai-Tat Fu, Thomas George Kannampallil, and Ruogu Kang. 2009. A Semantic Imitation Model of Social Tag Choices. In Proceedings of 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering. IEEE. 66-72. [IEEE link]
Ruogu Kang, Thomas George Kannampallil, Jibo He, and Wai-Tat Fu. 2009. Conformity out of Diversity: Dynamics of Information Needs and Social Influence of Tags in Exploratory Information Search. In Proceedings of HCI International 2009. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 155-164. [Full paper]
2007
Yusen Dai, Qin Gao, Zao Fan, and Ruogu Kang. 2007. User Perceived Quality of Online Social Information Services: From the Perspective of Knowledge Management. In Proceedings of 2007 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management. IEEE. 482-486. [Full paper]
My current research focuses on these two directions:
Internet anonymity and information transparency
2010 - now | with Sara Kiesler, Stephanie Brown, and Laura Dabbish | CMU
This project investigates people's experience with anonymity on the Internet and their attitudes about managing personal information online. It was developed under the XIA project about the next generation of the Internet. I conducted interviews with people from seven different countries to find out why they want to be anonymous and what method they use to achieve anonymity online. I also designed and analyzed an international survey and a U.S. representative survey (collaborated with Pew Research Center) on how people manage their online information and their opinions on anonymity and privacy.
Paper 1: Privacy attitudes of Mechanical Turk workers and the U.S. public.[paper]
Paper 2: Why do people seek anonymity? [paper]
Paper 3: Social transparency in networked information exchange [paper]
Information and knowledge sharing in asynchronous collaborative analysis
2010 - 2014 | with Sara Kiesler, Aimée Kane, and Susan Fussell | CMU
This project is about supporting implicit information sharing in asynchronous collaborative work. The goal of this study is to make analysts' work more transparent so that it could help another person perform better on the same task.
Study 2: The influence of sensemaking tools and partners' information quality on collaborative analysis [paper]
Study 1: The use of annotations in asynchronous collabortion [paper][poster]
In the past, I have worked on several other projects.
Crowdsourced Learning on the Job: A Case Study in Collaborative Translation
Fall 2010 | with Jeff Rzeszotarski, Kerry Chang, Peter Kinnaird, and Niki Kittur | CMU
We investigated translation tasks on Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing market. By examining workers translating both individually and in groups, we provided a use case for interface development that supports collaborative translation and we showed that crowdsourcing can gainfully employ workers in developing regions while at the same time allowing workers to learn language skills.
Information searching and domain expertise
2008 - 2010 | with Wai-Tat Fu, Jibo He, and Thomas G. Kannampallil | UIUC
This study compared how domain experts and novices performed exploratory search using a traditional search engine and a social tagging system. Results showed that social tagging systems could facilitate exploratory search for both experts and novices. We found a dynamic interaction between knowledge-in-the-head and knowledge-in-the-social-web that although information seekers are more and more reliant on information from the social Web, domain expertise is still important in guiding them to find and evaluate the information.
[Paper]
Understanding factors affecting perceived sociability of social software
2006 - 2008 | with Qin Gao, Yusen Dai, Zao Fan, and Yuancheng Yang | Tsinghua University
The goal of this study was to identify factors that affect Chinese users' perception of the sociability of social software. We conducted interviews and questionnaires to understand how people use different social software to supplement their social life and to explore the possible factors that influence the users' utilization of social software. Results show that sociability is influenced by social climate, benefits and purposes, people, interaction richness, self-presentation, and support for formal interaction.
[Paper]
Copyright Ruogu Kang. Updated September 2014.
