Completing the Virtuous Cycle between Payment and Social Engagement in Freemium Social Communities

I was there in this talk from Dr. Ravi. The talk was about the different business model that are currently employed by some of the social communities, for example, last.fm, Spotify. He mainly talked about the Freemium model, where users are free to use the service from the website within a certain range. But using beyond these service would charge the user. His team has lead some experiments that would increase the freemium users to payment users.

Detecting Associations Between Genetic Variants and Output Traits Using Prior Biological Knowledge

In this talk, Dr. Seunghak Lee presented a novel method that uses prior biological knowledge to boost the statistical power of detecting genetic variants associated with traits. This work reminds me the research in courseagent, in which we are planning to use the prior knowledge on the course histories of past students' and output the courses that might be interesting to the current students with same path.

The Password That Never Was

Dec 9, 2013 11AM
I attended the talk from Dr. Ari Juels, in which he described the threatens to the most common defense of passwords, hashing. Although hashing is supposed to be very hard for attacks, there are password cracking tools that can easily defeat hashing. He introduced a new defense called honeywords, which are decoys designed to be indistinguishable from legitimate passwords, and a related idea, called honey encryption, which creates ciphertexts that decrypt under incorrect keys to seemingly valid messages.

Opening the Mind to Learning: Intellectual Humility Predicts Beneficial Approaches to Learning

I was there in a talk from Dr. Karina Schumann, Stanford University. She introduced a new terminology to me, Intellectual Humility. Intellectual Humility means being aware that you don't know everything, that you are probably wrong as often as you are right, and that others have as much opportunity to be right if they apply themselves as you do. It also means not fearing to be wrong, but instead viewing it as an opportunity to be right later. She presented several studies related to this topic. One of the studies found that intellectual humility was associated with greater motivation to learn and greater self-reported engagement in adaptive strategies for learning. In other study, intellectual humility was associated with greater openness to learning from others in a disagreement context. These are really interesting heads ups regarding designing the online social learning system, where high motivation of the learners are critical factors influencing their learning outcomes.