Mazurek, Rand Receive ADVANCE Seed Grant

Two UMIACS faculty members were just awarded a one-year, $20,000 interdisciplinary seed grant to study the effects of online information sharing.

Michelle Mazurek and Bill Rand received an ADVANCE Interdisciplinary and Engaged Seed Grant Award for their project titled “Making the Costs of Data Sharing More Salient.”

Each year, ADVANCE provides seed grants to small groups of researchers (led by a woman PI) involved in interdisciplinary and engaged research. The seed grants are awarded through a competitive peer review process, with 24 projects being funded this year.

Mazurek, an assistant professor of computer science affiliated with the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2) and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL), will serve as PI on the project.

The goal of the project, she says, is to give users an indication about possible longer-term consequences when they choose to share information online, in order to help them make more informed decisions.

The team, which also includes MC2 member and HCIL Director Jennifer Golbeck, plans to approach the problem by utilizing user studies to evaluate what kind of consequences people are most interested in learning about, and empirically measuring aspects of these costs in the real world.

The eventual goal is to design an indicator that can provide users with this information in an effective but not too disruptive way.

ADVANCE—which stands for “advancing women, transforming the university, and investing in a culture of exclusive excellence”—focuses on improving work environments, retention, and advancement of tenured and tenure-track women faculty at the University of Maryland.

The university’s Division of Research and the National Science Foundation fund the program.