Pitt Admissions's video: Rosta Farzan

Rosta Farzan is an Associate Professor at the School of Computing and Information. She earned her PhD in Intelligent Systems from the University of Pittsburgh and currently teaches courses on Social Computing, Analysis and Design of Information Systems, and Research Design. Dr. Farzan studies socio-technical systems that empower individuals and groups to contribute to knowledge production and community building, such as Wikipedia, online discussion forums, and hyper-local online communities. Her research focuses on understanding what contributes to the sustainability of socio-technical systems; how to encourage participation of under-represented groups in socio-technical systems; and, what the value of these systems are for their users and beyond. She studies how these systems can play a role in addressing important societal problems, such as increasing civic engagement, empowering non-profit organizations, fighting cyber-bullying, supporting individual's privacy in face of high presence of sensors, and increasing reliability and neutrality of user-generated information in social media. Her research has been supported by a variety of federal, academic, and industry sources such as the National Science Foundation, AT&T, and Google. Dr. Farzan’s work has been published in high impact conferences such as the ACM CHI, ACM CSCW, Social Informatics, Communities and Technologies, World Wide Web, and the ACM Group.