Research
I recently defended my dissertation in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I will receive my PhD in May, 2010. My dissertation, Namespaces We Live By: Multiple Identifiers in Messaging (abstract) explores the tensions between social, technical, and policy constraints related to identity management, online identifiers, and namespaces. This research fits into my broader interest in the intersections of technical infrastructure, usability, security, behavior, and policy.
Academic and professional experience
I am the online editor for Messaging News. I research and write on topics in messaging and infrastructure including: email, instant messaging, mobile messaging, social software, VoIP, collaborative software, usability, and security.
Researcher at the Highlands Group—a consulting network that assists corporations, organizations, and government in identifying new technologies, ideas, opportunities, and markets.
Analyst at Ferris Research from 2003 to 2008 where I covered industry research and development in messaging and collaboration products and systems.
Engineering intern at Google from 2005 to 2006 where I worked on identity management in Google Accounts.
Visiting scholar at School of Information (formerly the School of Information Management and Systems) at the University of California Berkeley from 2000 to 2006 where I collaborated with the Social Technologies Group and Information Quality Research Group.
Coordinator of the 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 at the Community Architectures for Network Information Systems (CANIS) lab from 1994 to 2000. CANIS was an information infrastructure research project that developed information analysis environments.
Coordinator of 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 of 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).
Publications and presentations
(Ab)using Identifiers: Indiscernibility of Identity BayCHI, the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI). Palo Alto, CA, November 10, 2009.
Benjamin M. Gross. Names of Our Lives. CSE ’09. International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, volume 4, pages 747–752, Vancouver, Canada, August 29–31, 2009. Local copy of the article.
Dynamics of “Free” Information. Fujitsu Laboratories of America Technology Symposium. Sunnyvale, CA, November 14, 2007.
Benjamin M. Gross and Elizabeth F. Churchill. Addressing Constraints: Multiple Usernames Task Spillage and Notions of Identity. CHI ’07 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 2393–2398, New York, NY, 2007. ACM Press. Local copy of the article.
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 in 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, pages 258–259, London, UK, 2002. Springer-Verlag.
Benjamin M. Gross. Personal Digital Libraries of Email. The Fourth All-Russian Scientific Conference on Digital Libraries: Advanced Methods and Technologies, Digital Collections, pages 17–25, Dubna, Russia, October 15–17, 2002.