Starting today, I work as a Student Helper in Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology. The branch from Sankt Augustin, which I joined, is focused on the research of human-centered computing in a process context. I will activate in the Cooperation and Community Support department, which deals with the research and development of community portals, (mobile) communities and cooperation, Internet-based groupware, cooperative knowledge management, application service providing for cooperative work and virtual teams, rating and recommender systems and cooperative learning environments.
The head of the department is Prof. Wolfgang Prinz, PhD and I will work closely with Mr. Nils Jeners, researcher in FIT. I had the pleasure of attending Mr. Prinz course, CSCW and Groupware, while being student in the Media Informatics Master, held by RWTH Aachen University. CSCW stands for Computer Supported Collaborative Work.
My first task is to study the Twitter community, applications based on it and the actual phenomena. My work should help in better understanding the aspects of human behavior, social interaction between humans and in particular the tools and services used for microblogging. This will allow also to discover ways to extract patterns in the context of this technology, who is changing the ways that people interact and socialize over the Internet.