Ben Gross

Research

I am a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). My dissertation focuses on identity management, online identifiers, and namespaces particular email addresses and instant messenger screen names, and explores the tensions between social, technical, and policy constraints. This research fits into my broader interest in the intersections of technical infrastructure, usability, behavior, and policy. Please see my dissertation abstract for further details.

Academic and professional experience

I am the online editor for Messaging News since 2007. I research and write on consumer email and instant messaging, presence, mobile messaging, open source messaging infrastructure, social software, social network analysis, lightweight collaborative software, and Voice over IP (VOIP). In addition, I have more than ten years of experience with system and network administration, specification, deployment, evaluation, and security analysis.

Analyst, Ferris Research from 2003-2008 where I covered messaging and collaboration.

Engineering intern, Google from 2005 to 2006. I worked on identity management in Google Accounts.

Visiting scholar, School of Information (formerly the School of Information Management and Systems) at the University of California Berkeley from 2000-2006 where I collaborated with the Social Technologies Group and Information Quality Research Group.

Coordinator, Digital Libraries Initiative Phase Two for the National Science Foundation from 1998 to 2003. The DLI Phase Two included projects on digital libraries from thirty U.S. and international universities. Additional collaborating agencies included: National Library of Medicine, Library of Congress, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Archives and Records Administration, Smithsonian Institution, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Researcher, Community Architectures for Network Information Systems (CANIS) lab from 1994 to 2000. CANIS was a long-term information infrastructure research project that developed information analysis environments.

Coordinator, the Digital Libraries Initiative Phase One from 1994 to 1998. Phase One consisted of six projects in the joint initiative of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Founder, the Special Interest Group for Computers and Society (SIGCAS) and the Special Interest Group for Information Retrieval (SIGIR) in the UIUC student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Recent publications and conference presentations

Benjamin M. Gross and Elizabeth F. Churchill. Addressing constraints: multiple usernames task spillage and notions of identity. In CHI '07 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, pages 2393–2398, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM Press. Local copy.

Benjamin M. Gross. Segmentation and Integration of Social Worlds Through Multiple Identifiers in Messaging. Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR). Chicago, IL, October 5-9, 2005.

Marc A. Smith, Jeff Ubois and Benjamin M. Gross. Forward Thinking. Second Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS). Palo Alto, CA, July 21-22, 2005. Press coverage includes The New Scientist and The New York Times.

Benjamin M. Gross. Multiple Email Addresses: A Socio-technical Investigation. First Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS). Mountain View, CA, July 30-31, 2004.

Ben Gross and Alessandro Acquisti. Balances of Power on eBay: Peers or Unequals? The Berkeley Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems. Berkeley, CA, June 5-6, 2003.

Benjamin M. Gross. Navigation, Organization and Retrieval in Personal Collections of Email. The 5th International Conference of Asian Digital Libraries. Digital Libraries: People, Knowledge & Technology. Singapore December 11-14, 2002. in Lim, E.-P.; Foo, S.; Khoo, C.; Chen, H.; Fox, E.; Shalini, U.; Thanos, C. (Eds.) Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Volume. 2555. Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg New York (2002) pp. 258–259.

Benjamin M. Gross. Personal Digital Libraries of Email. The Fourth All-Russian Scientific Conference on Digital Libraries: Advanced Methods and Technologies, Digital Collections. Dubna, Russia, October 15-17, 2002. In proc.