CAREER: Models and Methods to Help Online Communities Support Behaviors Aligned with Community Norms

NSF Award Search · 01002829DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT · $700,000 · view on nsf.gov ↗

Abstract

This project aims to develop new methods to support community-determined behavior norms in online communities consistent with the goal of helping communities reward behaviors that serve the community's goals. Current approaches to online community management typically focus on detecting and discouraging undesirable behavior with sanctions like bans, quarantines, and content removals. These punitive approaches do not directly foster an environment for community members to engage in positive ways around the group's norms. This project will look at ways to use positive reinforcement to proactively incentivize community-determined behavior. The work will advance knowledge about how communities recognize and encourage behavior while developing novel technologies to promote community norms in online spaces. The education and outreach plan is deeply tied to the research activities, focusing on scaling up the broader impacts of the research. A public application programming interface will enable developers and moderators around the world to integrate the computational approaches developed by this research into their own communities. The project will be carried out in three phases. Phase 1 will involve the development of new computational models to detect community-determined behavior across different types of online communities. This phase will uncover the structure of encouraged behavior within online conversations and develop community- and context-sensitive computational mod

Key facts

NSF award ID
2439433
Awardee
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (IL)
SAM.gov UEI
Y8CWNJRCNN91
PI
Eshwar Chandrasekharan
Primary program
01002829DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
All programs
CAREER-Faculty Erly Career Dev, Cyber-Human Systems
Estimated total
$700,000
Funds obligated
$444,823
Transaction type
Continuing Grant
Period
06/15/2025 → 05/31/2030