As the director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, Jennifer Golbeck studies how people use social media — and thinks about ways to improve their interactions.

Why you should listen

Jennifer Golbeck is an associate professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, where she also moonlights in the department of computer science. Her work invariably focuses on how to enhance and improve the way that people interact with their own information online. "I approach this from a computer science perspective and my general research hits social networks, trust, web science, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction," she writes.

Author of the 2013 book, Analyzing the Social Web, Golbeck likes nothing more than to immerse herself in the inner workings of the Internet tools so many millions of people use daily, to understand the implications of our choices and actions. Recently, she has also been working to bring human-computer interaction ideas to the world of security and privacy systems.

Jennifer Golbeck’s TED talk

More news and ideas from Jennifer Golbeck