Loren Terveen

About

I am a Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at The University of Minnesota. As of 2025, I serve as Department Head for Computer Science & Engineering. I also co-lead the GroupLens Research Lab. My research areas are social computing, human-computer interaction, and intelligent systems. I focus on issues including detecting and addressing bias, methods for doing ethical research with online communities, and integrating human and machine intelligence in systems like Wikipedia. I have interface design expertise in contexts including mobile and location-aware systems, and web search and information management.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• World Wide Web
• Engineering
• Knowledge management
• Human–computer interaction
• Programming language
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Human‐centered recommender systems: Origins, advances, challenges, and opportunities

  AI Magazine · 2021-09-01 · 46 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract From the earliest days of the field, Recommender Systems research and practice has struggled to balance and integrate approaches that focus on recommendation as a machine learning or missing‐value problem with ones that focus on machine learning as a discovery tool and perhaps persuasion platform. In this article, we review 25 years of recommender systems research from a human‐centered perspective, looking at the interface and algorithm studies that advanced our understanding of how sys…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Keeping Designers in the Loop

  2020 · 42 citations

  Artificial intelligence algorithms have been used to enhance a wide variety of products and services, including assisting human decision making in high-stake contexts. However, these algorithms are complex and have trade-offs, notably between prediction accuracy and fairness to population subgroups. This makes it hard for designers to understand algorithms and design products or services in a way that respects users' goals, values, and needs. We proposed a method to help designers and users expl…

  DOI

• Effective Strategies for Crowd-Powered Cognitive Reappraisal Systems: A Field Deployment of the Flip*Doubt Web Application for Mental Health

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2021-10-13 · 24 citations

  articleOpen access

  Online technologies offer great promise to expand models of delivery for therapeutic interventions to help users cope with increasingly common mental illnesses like anxiety and depression. For example, "cognitive reappraisal" is a skill that involves changing one's perspective on negative thoughts in order to improve one's emotional state. In this work, we present Flip*Doubt, a novel crowd-powered web application that provides users with cognitive reappraisals ("reframes") of negative thoughts.…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Quantifying the Gap: A Case Study of Wikidata Gender Disparities

  2021-09-15 · 16 citations

  articleSenior author

  Much prior research has found gender bias in peer production systems like Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. This bias affects both women’s participation in these platforms and content about women on these platforms. We investigated the gender content gap in Wikidata, where less than 22% of items that represent people are about women. We asked: what is the source of this bias? Specifically, does it originate from the actions of Wikidata editors or from external factors; that is, does it simply reflect…

  PublisherDOI

• Sway Together, Stay Together: Visualizing Spiritual Support Networks Through the SoulGarden Prototype

  2021-10-22 · 16 citations

  articleSenior author

  Spiritual support is a fundamental yet understudied dimension of support exchange in Online Health Communities. Recent work suggested that visualization of spiritual support networks offers a promising design mechanism for helping patients and caregivers navigate life-threatening physical or mental illnesses. Therefore, through user-centered and community-situated inquiry, we designed and developed SoulGarden–an interface that helps users visualize their spiritual support network in order to red…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• SoCS: Collaborative Research: Novel Algorithms and Interaction Mechanisms to Enhance Social Production

  NSF · $543k · 2012–2016

• HCC: Small: Tools and Mechanisms to Support Civic GeoCampaigns

  NSF · $515k · 2012–2017

• Collaborative Research: Supporting Newcomer Socialization in Online Production Communities

  NSF · $301k · 2011–2016

Frequent coauthors

• Brian Amento

  AT&T (United States)

  23 shared

• Will Hill

  21 shared

• Joseph A. Konstan

  University of Minnesota

  19 shared

• Brent Hecht

  Northwestern University

  19 shared

• Pamela Ludford

  University of Minnesota

  18 shared

• Dan Frankowski

  16 shared

• Jacob Thebault-Spieker

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  14 shared

• John Riedl

  United Monolithic Semiconductor (France)

  14 shared

Labs

• GroupLensPI

  GroupLens is a research group at the University of Minnesota that focuses on recommender systems and social computing.

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science

  University of Minnesota

  1990

• M.S., Computer Science

  University of Minnesota

  1986

• B.S., Computer Science

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1983

Awards & honors

• SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award

Similar researchers at University of Minnesota

• Dan Knightsh-97
• Yousef Saadh-81