Systematic and logical engagement of theories to inform design is foundational in designing technology for human use. Theories can inspire, reflect, and facilitate in making practical choices in design. Indeed, many designs of data-centric computing solutions are grounded in theories from computer science. Increasingly, these solutions deal with data that are either related to humans (e.g., surveillance data) or produced by humans (e.g., social data). Many of these solutions are also directly consumed by humans. Consequently, they need to be cognizant of the influence of behaviours of (interacting) individuals and how people think and process information generated by these solutions. In this project, we explore psychology theory-informed design of data- and human-centric computing frameworks where theories from social and cognitive psychology, in addition to the theories from computer science, are explicitly used to guide their design. For example, social psychology theories such as conformity and confirmation bias can be exploited to guide the design of online social influence analysis techniques. Our current research focus in the arena of social analytics and database querying and exploration.
Publications
- SIERRA: A Counterfactual Thinking-based Visual Interface for Property Graph Query Construction. Jiebing Ma, Sourav S Bhowmick, Lester Tay, Byron Choi. In ACM SIGMOD, Santiago, Chile, June 2024 (Demo) [Video].
- Cognitive Psychology Meets Data Management: State of the Art and Future Directions. Sourav S Bhowmick, Annabel S.H. Chen, Divesh Srivastava. In ACM SIGMOD, Santiago, Chile, June 2024 (Tutorial) [Slides].
- Social Psychology Meets Social Computing: State of the Art and Future Directions. Sourav S Bhowmick, Hui Li, Annabel S.H. Chen, Yining Zhao. In The ACM Web Conference, Singapore, May 2024 (Tutorial) [Slides].
- Theories and Principles Matter: Towards Visually Appealing and Effective Abstraction of Property Graph Queries. Jiebing Ma, Sourav S Bhowmick, Byron Choi, Lester Tay. In ACM SIGMOD, Seattle, USA, June 2023.
- VOYAGER: Automatic Computation of Visual Complexity and Aesthetics of Graph Query Interfaces. Duy Pham, Sourav S Bhowmick. In EDBT, Ioannina, Greece, March 2023 (Demo).
- CHASSIS: Conformity Meets Online Information Diffusion. Hui Li, Hui Li, Sourav S Bhowmick. In ACM SIGMOD, June 2020.