An interdisciplinary group of researchers at Northeastern University has embarked on an ambitious multi-million dollar project project To study the way people behave online - and thus how the internet behaves again.
thanks for the A grant of $15.7 million from National Science Foundation, the team began recruiting volunteers for an online data collection project, which will involve monitoring the online experiences of tens of thousands of volunteer users through a web browser extension that researchers build, then documenting and analyzing the results. When all is said and done, the data collected will be available to scientists around the world and across disciplines for research purposes, according to the foundation’s mandate for the project.
“That’s a huge part missing from the internet study,” he says. David LazerDistinguished University Professor of Political Science and Computer Science, and Co-Director of Nolab for texts, maps and gridswho leads the project.
The money is now used to buildNational Internet Observatory. “
“The observatory enables a broad range of internet-related research, including examination of the state of the information ecosystem, analysis of harmful online behavior of a variety of species, and general studies of multiple aspects of the internet world,” the researchers wrote in the observatory. their suggestion.
Lazer says there are many research questions driving the project forward as it relates to these goals. Like how much does Twitter, for example, amplify some voices and accounts over others? Or how often does Google direct people to high reliability resources versus low reliability resources?
The researchers also hope to learn more about how information systems and algorithms enable users to find information — reports, comments, and other sources — that fits their ideologies. This is referred to as “filter bubble“The effect that experts They referred to it as a contributing factor to political polarization and broader social divisions.
The researchers’ primary motivation is to explore and, where possible, separate “human and algorithmic selection” on the Internet. As it relates to, the monitoring project will help researchers gain “insight into what people choose to do” when using social media platforms, “but also what the platforms do in return,” Lazer says.
All this will happen without compromising the personal privacy of the volunteers involved.
Other collaborators on the project include Christo WilsonAssociate Professor of Computer Science; David ChauvinsAssociate Professor of Computer Science and Executive Director of Institute of Cyber Security and Privacy; John Basel, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University; and Michelle Meyer, bioethicist at Geisinger Health System. Lazer, Wilson, and Choffnes are the principal investigators on the project.
The researchers built and published a web browser extension that would feed them information about which URLs volunteers visit and what they’re looking for on their devices. A critical component of a monitoring infrastructure is to ensure that it captures the activities of not only those with desktop devices, but mobile users as well.
That’s the focus of Choffnes, who is leading the mobile data collection aspect of the project, deploying apps for both Androids and iPhones that will enable some network traffic collection from those devices.
“I think a lot of us spend most of our time online via apps on our mobile devices, not through web browsers,” Chauvins says. “I’m deploying a measurement system that allows us to capture this view—specifically, the services people use on their phones and tablets.”
“This will give us insight into how people interact with the incredibly wide and rich range of online services that exist in the mobile space, from social media to mobility, health and more – and how these services personalize content for users and share information with others,” says Choffnes.
The researchers began recruiting volunteers last week. They hope to get the word out to anyone who might be interested, and they aim to recruit a diverse sample of the population.
“You have to go through a very rigorous approval process,” Lazer says. “We’ll explain exactly what we’re collecting, and then test people to make sure they understand it.”
Those interested can do so at the National Internet Observatory website. Once the information is collected, it will be stored on a secure server maintained by Northeastern. Those permitted to access the databases include system administrators and researchers who have undergone a “rigorous ethical and technical scrutiny”.
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