The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University is excited to announce the newest addition to its adjunct faculty, Dr. Catherine C. Marshall. Until the lab's closing in September, her most recent endeavor was principal researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley.
She received a bachelor’s degree of english from the California Institute of Technology where she graduated with honors and her master’s also from Caltech in computer science. Before joining Microsoft, she was heavily involved in hypertext research at Xerox PARC at the dawn of the Internet era, and contributed to several of the center's ethnographically-oriented work practice groups.
Her research focuses on areas related to the curation, organization and analysis of digital information; personal information management; and information-based collaboration.
“I bring to my research a valuable breadth of experience with crowdsourcing, data analysis, socio-technical design, ethnographically-motivated fieldwork and observations of technology in use,” Marshall said.
Becoming an adjunct professor will enable her to continue the long-running collaboration with Professor Frank Shipman, and would allow her to pursue new collaborations with other members of the department and in related disciplines at Texas A&M.
“We are in the midst of a multi-year effort to explore policy and design issues that stem from peoples' attitudes about the ownership and reuse of social media and other user-contributed content on the Web,” she said. “Besides characterizing these attitudes, we are interested in working with users to co-design large-scale social media archives and the policies for access to them.”
Another area Marshall and Shipman are pursuing is connected with crowdsourcing; they are interested in developing techniques to improve the quality of data collected via crowdsourcing and in characterizing important aspects of crowd workers.
“We want to understand who participates in crowd sourced efforts and what motivates them to do so," she said. "We will be seeking funding in both areas.”
Computer science has experienced recent growth and the addition of Marshall as adjunct professor will help in the continued momentum of the department.