Rostaf

Rostaf

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Name	Rosta Farzan
Education and employment
Occupation	Associate Professor School of Computing and Information University of Pittsburgh
Education	Ph.D in Intelligent Systems Program (2009) University of Pittsburgh

My name is Rosta Farzan. I am a researcher in the field of social computing. I am an associate professor at the School of Computing and Information at University of Pittsburgh. Prior to my current position, I was a postdoc in Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University under supervision of Prof. Robert E. Kraut. I am interested in studying social psychology theories in online communities to understand and design more effective communities.

In my research, I am interested in building the bridge between information science and psychology by applying technologies to design interventions in online communities and studying different aspects of those communities. Particularly I am interested in studying the challenges of encouraging participation, and socialization of newcomers. In my prior work, I have studied user participation in community based systems such as community based recommender systems and social networking sites.

In my PhD dissertation work, I studied the phenomena of "social navigation" in information space. Social navigation, defined as "navigation towards cluster of people", happens very often in physical world. We tend to follow traces of other people specially those whom we share goals, interest, and opinions with. In my research, I studied how social navigation can be implemented in information space and how it affects users' behavior.