At MSOE my primary obligation is teaching and most of my research has been focused on developing and modifying courses. This summer, for example, that has meant spending a lot of time in the Disability Studies world to try to read some of the seminal literature in the field and figure out how to ensure that my students in Inclusive Design are exposed to some basic concepts and texts from that world.

Since I began teaching in 2019/2020 which was significantly disrupted by COVID, I've also been very focused on finding ways to ensure that my students are supported within and outside of the classroom. While I felt that I had mechanisms for doing this prior to COVID, they needed to be changed and altered. My approach for during the worst of COVID has also continued through today.

For my last two years at Google, I focused on tools for IT admins and SecOps teams to help protect their domains and users. This involved work on security center as well as data loss prevention. I did evaluative research, assessing pre-release products and making recommendations for changes, but much of my research was foundational. As someone new to the security space, I wanted to learn more about how decisions were made and implemented as well as understanding more about the resourcing of security teams.

My first three years at Google were on the Payments team. This got me interested in studying personal finance, financial management, and the digitalization of financial services. I'm passionate about this research because it makes a difference. There are many aspects of this topic, such as access to financial services. Access to formal financial services, such as bank accounts and loans, is incredibly important, especially for helping to alleviate poverty because they help individuals save money, build credit, and protect against risk (sickness, job loss, etc.). In this digital age, there are a number of financial services available online, increasing the options for those who are geographically isolated or homebound, however the HCI literature has almost no research on existing barriers to online financial services or how online financial services are being utilized by different populations.

My dissertation research was in the area of social computing and HCI. I studied the dynamics of online peer production communities, specifically how consumers and average contributors differ from users who produce the majority of the content. I've looked in depth at this issue in both Wikipedia and Cyclopath. As part of my research I've done logs analysis, surveys, interviews, and user testing.

My research, while always somewhat quantitative in nature, started to incorporate qualitative elements due to the fact that I couldn't answer all the questions I wanted to using data logs alone. I was very interested in looking at sites that offer the option of user contribution (such as Wikipedia). My dissertation research investigated quantitative and qualitative differences between consumers, average contributors, and core contributors (who produce the majority of the content). How do these users differ in their usage of the site, when they contribute, the quality of their contributions, the type of work they are doing, how much time they spend on the site, their reasons for using the site, the benefits they receive from the site, etc.?

While my early work studied Wikipedia, the remainder of my work was based on the site Cyclopath. Cyclopath is a geographic wiki started by Reid Priedhorsky and Loren Terveen in 2006 in GroupLens lab. The primary goal of Cyclopath is to give cyclists in the Twin Cities a good, bike-friendly route between two points. The secondary goal is to allow the map to be edited by any user. This allows users to receive up to date information. As we ran the site out of our research lab, we had access to data logs, the option to add features to the site, and the ability to meet our users in person.

Part of what interested me in this domain was the conflict that while we (site owners, researchers) think we want everyone to participate, the sites usually work smoothly without everyone contributing. However, anecdotally, we know that some people have information to offer that they aren't contributing. How can we get users to contribute information that is useful to the site without forcing people to contribute or having a site overrun with unnecessary contributions?

K. Panciera, M. Masli, and L. Terveen. “'Creme de la creme: Elite contributors in an online community”. In Proc. OpenSym 2014.
Acceptance rate: 45%
PDF

K. Krauskopf, J. Bertram, Y. P. A. Hsiao, S. Huber, K. Panciera, N. Sträfling, A. Wichmann, and J. van Aalst. "Memetic Processes as Conceptual Framework for Idea Improvement in Knowledge Building." In Proc. ICLS 2012.

K. Panciera, M. Masli, and L. Terveen. “'How should I go from __ to __ without getting killed?' Motivation and Benefits in Open Collaboration”. In Proc. WikiSym 2011.
Acceptance rate: 42%
PDF

K. Panciera, R. Priedhorsky, T. Erickson, and L. Terveen. “Lurking? Cyclopaths? A Quantitative Lifecycle Analysis of User Behavior in a Geowiki”. In Proc. CHI 2010. Honorable Mention for Best Paper.
Acceptance rate: 22%
PDF

K. Panciera, A. Halfaker, and L. Terveen. "Wikipedians are Born, Not Made: A Study of Power Editors in Wikipedia." Proceedings of GROUP 2009.
Acceptance rate: 36%
PDF

R. Priedhorsky, J. Chen, S. T. K. Lam, K. Panciera, L. Terveen, J. Riedl. “Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia”. In Proc. GROUP 2007.
Acceptance rate: 28%
PDF

K. Cannon, K. Panciera, and N. Papanikolopoulos. "Second Annual Robotics Summer Camp for Underrepresented Students." In Proc. ITiCSE 2007.
Acceptance rate: 30%

K. Cannon, M. LaPoint, N. Bird, K. Panciera, H. Veeraraghavan, N. Papanikolopoulos, and M. Gini. "Summer Educational Opportunities for Underrepresented Groups Using Robots". IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine. June 2007.