Laura Dabbish

Laura Dabbish is an associate professor in the HCII and Heinz College at CMU.

She studies the social effects of digital transparency. Her research connects social and organizational psychology with technology and design. An emerging Internet trend is greater digital transparency, such as the use of real names in social networking sites, feeds of friends’ activities traces of content re-use, and visualizations of team interactions. This transparency could radically improve collaboration and learning. It also presents new challenges around privacy and identity management. Her goal is to understand the social benefits and tradeoffs of digital transparency for users.

Dabbish collaborate with researchers across a variety of fields, including social psychology, organizational behavior, sociology, cyber-security, networking, software development and information systems to understand this multifaceted socio-technical phenomenon. They study the nature of interaction in existing settings with high levels of digital transparency, such as online professional social networking communities, and experiment with new designs to make workflows, content provenance, and work histories transparent.