The pervasiveness and mobility of network-enabled devices has changed the way people interact with applications and it has also changed the way we interact with each other. Mobile devices and applications have the potential to provide users with a multitude of context-specific resources, collect a wealth of information about users and their environments, and enable users to become information sources. These systems have great potential to play an increased role in socially relevant domains, but a deeper understanding of the interactions between users, environments, applications and networks, is necessary to realize the potential to address large-scale problems. As we move forward it is critical to consider the entire system including the users. The goal of this research is to advance the understanding of network-based socio-technical systems by creating, modeling and analyzing a specific system based at the Chicago Zoological Society?s Brookfield Zoo. The Zoo can be viewed as a rich social system including staff, animals and a diverse group of over two million visitors per year. This project creates a socio-technical system to study by introducing technology with the purpose of enticing visitors to become citizen scientists by observing and reporting animal behavior, and allowing anyone to interact with the animal observation data collected by researchers. Social networking applications will be used to share animal observations and to explicitly make the animals part of the online social network. The Intellectual Merit of this project involves the interdisciplinary study of networks as an enabling technology and as a model for understanding the relationships between stakeholders at the Zoo. By creating a unified socio-technical framework to consider and model the relationships between the stakeholders and technology, one can explore many research issues. The research will aid in gaining a deeper understanding of the factors that influence information transfer across social networks. It will allow consideration of the types of information that are likely to stimulate network activity and facilitate a cognitive system that adapts to environment to optimize user outcomes. We will be able to ascertain how information from various sources (e.g. scientists, guests, educators) influences activity of the network and transmission of specific messages through the network. This work will also provide a demonstration of how individuals with fundamentally different roles in the network (animals, application designers, and application users) influence network outcomes. The Broader Impact of this project includes the software application introduced at the zoo, the research outcomes and the students exposed to the project. People of varied socio-economic backgrounds as well as many school groups and other organizations visit Brookfield Zoo. The National Research Council (NRC 2009) concludes that informal learning environments (e.g. Zoos) can have a significant impact on science learning outcomes for underrepresented groups. The work proposed here will be fundamental in determining a new role for technology in this learning. More immediately, it can also encourage a diverse audience of zoo visitors to pursue interests in the zoo animals and perhaps become a citizen scientist, reporting observations and investigating the data collected. Increased understanding of the connections between design and engineering of technology and social outcomes can empower us to best utilize technology to solve important social problems. This work will serve as a model for optimizing resource distribution when there is the potential to utilize comprehensive integrated information (social and technical) and the goal is to increase message transfer and understanding. Additionally, a diverse group of students will be involved and trained through this project. The PIs have a track record of working with underrepresented groups and will use this project as a platform to involve even more women and minorities.
Network enabled devices like smartphones and wireless tablet computers are changing the way people learn and interact with each other. These tools offer the opportunity to engage their users in socially relevant actions. To do this, a deeper understanding of the entire system – from machines to people is necessary. This project created a socio-technical system at Chicago Zoological Society’s Brookfield Zoo. The zoo is a rich social system that includes staff, animals and a diverse group of over two million visitors each year. The socio-technical study system was created by introducing technology designed to entice visitors to become citizen scientists by observing and reporting animal behavior. This enticement came in the form of web-based applications that zoo guests could access with their smartphones from specific animal exhibits. Users were able to learn facts about animals, view photographs of them and also watch videos prior to performing their own observations. The applications offered language and designed content that allowed users who varied in their underlying interests to learn about the animals in a manner specific to their varied interests. We also used social networking applications to share animal observations and make animals themselves a core part of the zoo-followers’ online network. This project involved a diverse group of high school students, undergraduates and graduate students in computing as well as animal behavior research. Students played a significant creative role in developing the project, determining content for the applications and demonstrating them to zoo guests. Students were also closely involved in data analyses and several of them were able to present their research project experiences at various forums from seminars at the Zoo to national computing meetings.
