DENISE WILKINS, PHD

MY RESEARCH

Working Together: Collaboration, Cooperation and Technology for Positive Change

I'm passionate about understanding how people cooperate to solve everyday, real-world, social dilemmas, and how technology can help people work together for positive change.

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My research focuses on participation in - and collaboration across - networked technology. I use mixed methods to explore how technology design, and the resulting use of technology, affects social processes and organisational systems. I examine how technology design can help groups cooperate to create and share resources, and to advance their own empowerment aims: Through applied research, I generate insights to inform the design of useful and responsible systems. I also examine fundamental questions at the intersection of human behaviour and digital technology to improve scientific understanding of computer-mediated and collective behaviour. 

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Currently, I'm a researcher in the Future of Work group at Microsoft Research, Cambridge (UK).  My research explores innovative approaches for applying Machine Learning (ML) to support knowledge management in large organisations. My current work (Enterprise Knowledge) investigates how AI can become a useful vehicle to help workers find, share and reuse knowledge at work. Taking a human-centred approach, and utilizing qualitative and design methodologies, I study how people can partner with AI to create and share knowledge. I also explore how to create useful, interpretable and actionable ML insights that have the potential to help work become more effective and collaborative, and can empower workers to work the way that they want. Related to this, I recently published an article in ACM Interactions magazine: Designing AI Systems That Make Organisational Knowledge Actionable. 

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Prior to my work at Microsoft, I was a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter (UK). I worked as part of the Household-Energy Supplier Markets (HoSEM) project, which explored how blockchains can support the decentralisation of the energy market. My research used interviews, focus groups and quantitative surveys to examine the general public's perceptions of the current energy market and their aspirations for the future. I explored how peer-to-peer platforms should be designed to help people participate in the decarbonization process and advance their aims for the future of energy in the UK. Earlier this year I published a paper about my work in ACM CHI Conference, which was awarded the Honorable Mention award (top 5% of submissions): Peer-to-Peer Energy Markets: Understanding the Values of Collective and Community Trading.  

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I completed my PhD in Social Psychology at the University of Exeter's Social, Environmental and Organizational research group (SEORG). I examined how social media can affect collective action and social change. My research used experimental methods to test how different interactions and ways of presenting information on social media affected users' efficacy beliefs, social cognitions and willingness to participate in collective action. I also used qualitative methods to explore how rhetorical, identity and technology resources were used by Twitter users during the early stages of the Black Lives Matter movement to balance competing aims for social change. 

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