Browsing by Author "Chokshi, Apoorve"

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    Designing Social Media Tools for Emergency Response
    (2015-05-27) Chokshi, Apoorve; Maurer, Frank
    With the ubiquity of smartphones and the use of social media, people can share information with a population once reserved to traditional media (e.g. print, television, or radio). This combination has empowered citizens to use social media to share and disseminate information during emergencies, like the 2013 Southern Alberta floods and Bermuda Shorts Day 2014. Social media’s increased use during emergencies presents an interesting challenge for emergency operations centre personnel who need to filter and assess information before deciding if, how, and when to act, often in parallel with handling information from other sources. Though commercial tools exist, they are not designed with emergency management personnel in mind. This thesis presents Piu, a Twitter-based social media tool supporting both emergency planning and emergency response phases of emergency management. Piu was designed, built, and subsequently evaluated through a series interviews with emergency operations, campus security, and crisis communication experts.
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    News Feed: What's in it for Me?
    (ACM, 2015) Lapides, Paul; Chokshi, Apoorve; Carpendale, Sheelagh; Greenberg, Saul
    Over a billion people use social networking sites like Facebook to maintain awareness of their friends. Facebook's News Feed is the primary mechanism by which people are shown updates about their friends' daily activities on the site in the form of an algorithmically curated list of stories. This paper examines how people browse the News Feed, their perceptions and satisfaction while using it, and the interactions they make with their personal social network. We conducted a qualitative study involving think-aloud semi-structured interviews as the participants casually browsed their own feeds. We observed a wide variation in the use of the News Feed ranging from careful consideration of social conventions, judgment of people, and annoyance and frustration towards certain friends. Our findings suggest that people do not deliberately curate their own News Feed either due to lack of awareness or perceived social repercussions.