About Me

Human social interaction is taking place, increasingly, in online spaces. This presents us with unprecedented opportunities to study human behavior at enormous scale and fine granularity and to observe new social practices as they develop.

My dissertation research examined practices around online self-disclosure, with a particular focus towards understanding selective sharing, in which users share with particular sub-groups of their connections. Goals of this work include understanding how these practices vary across different social systems and producing models which can help predict audience selection decisions for particular pieces of content.

Other topics addressed in my graduate research include designing interfaces for consuming socially-mediated information, analyzing collective and grouping behavior in online social spaces, and designing novel interactive visualization systems for navigating large, complex networks.

Prior to my Ph.D., I obtained an M.A. in Philosophy and a B.S. in Mathematics with a minor in Symbolic Systems in 2006 (also from Stanford). In between, I worked at several different places, but most notably in the ASC Group at PARC, where I was mentored by Peter Pirolli, who I thank for sparking my interest in doing social computing research.

Research Areas

Socially-Mediated Information Consumption

A large portion of the information we seek and consume online comes to us through social channels. How do users leverage social sources in order to answer important questions? How can we design tools to improve users' efficiency in browsing incoming social content?

User Sub-grouping within Online Spaces

The Internet provides a variety of structured and unstructured places for people to assemble. What factors influence whether social groups will flourish or dissipate? What patterns of collective behavior can we observe in ad hoc interest groups formed around novel events?

Visualizing & Exploring Large Networks

Networks provide a powerful framework for analyzing large-scale interaction, but visualization representation techniques simply have not scaled. How can we facilitate discovery of high-level patterns in networks? How can we help users uncover specific nodes, edges, or clusters of interest? Nossos parceiros brasileiros - servico de ajuda aos estudantes no Brasil. Comprar tcc online neste site e faca o seu trabalho.

Selected Publications

Snap Decisions? How Users, Content, and Aesthetics Interact to Shape Photo Sharing Behaviors

Sanjay Kairam, Jofish Kaye, John Alexis Guerra Gomez, David Ayman Shamma

CHI 2016: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems [To Appear]

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Parting Crowds: Identifying Divergent Interpretations in Crowdsourced Annotation Tasks

Sanjay Kairam, Jeffrey Heer

CSCW 2016: ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing [To Appear]

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Refinery: Visual Exploration of Large, Heterogeneous Networks through Associative Browsing

Sanjay Kairam, Nathalie Henry Riche, Steven M. Drucker, Roland Fernandez, Jeffrey Heer

EuroVis 2015: Eurographics Conference on Visualization

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A Knowledge Tracing Model of Learning from a Social Tagging System

Peter Pirolli, Sanjay Kairam

UMUAI 2013: The Journal of User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction.

James Chen Best Paper Award PDF

Towards Supporting Search over Trending Events with Social Media

Sanjay Kairam, Meredith Ringel Morris, Jaime Teevan, Dan Liebling, Susan Dumais

ICWSM 2013: AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

Honorable Mention PDF

GraphPrism: Compact Visualization of Network Structure

Sanjay Kairam, Diana MacLean, Manolis Savva, Jeffrey Heer

AVI 2012: ACM Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces

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Talking in Circles: Selective Sharing in Google+

Sanjay Kairam, Mike Brzozowski, David Huffaker, Ed H. Chi

CHI 2012: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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The Life and Death of Online Groups: Predicting Group Growth and Longevity

Sanjay Kairam, Dan J. Wang, Jure Leskovec

WSDM 2012: ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining

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Eddi: Interactive Topic-Based Browsing of Social Status Streams

Michael S. Bernstein, Bongwon Suh, Lichan Hong, Jilin Chen, Sanjay Kairam, Ed H. Chi

UIST 2010: ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

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Designing a Cross-Channel Information Management Tool for Workers in Enterprise Task Forces

Gregorio Convertino, Sanjay Kairam, Lichan Hong, Bongwon Suh, Ed H. Chi

AVI 2010: ACM Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces

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FeedWinnower: Layering Structures over Collections of Information Streams

Lichan Hong, Gregorio Convertino, Bongwon Suh, Ed H. Chi, Sanjay Kairam

CHI 2010: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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Do Your Friends Make You Smarter? An Analysis of Social Strategies in Online Information Seeking

Brynn M. Evans, Sanjay Kairam, Peter Pirolli

IP & M 2010: Information Processing and Management

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Exploring the Cognitive Consequences of Social Search

Brynn M. Evans, Sanjay Kairam, Peter Pirolli

CHI 2009: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Works-in-Progress)

2nd Place: Student Research Competition PDF