Short Bio
Sean is an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor at the University of Missouri. His research foci are open-source software, serious game analytics, and human-centered data science. Sean is a founding member of the Linux Foundation’s working group on community health analytics for open-source software (CHAOSS). His work is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Mozilla, the US Department of Education, Red Hat Software, and the US Navy’s Office of Naval Research.
Sean also created the Data Science and Analytics Masters program at Missouri from 2013-2018. Sean’s publications focus on understanding how social technologies influence organizational, small group, and community dynamics, typically including analysis of electronic trace data from systems combined with the perspectives of people whose behavior is traced. He lives in Columbia, MO, with his wife Kate, two daughters (a third, the oldest, is off getting her Ph.D.), and a dog named Huckleberry.
Long Bio
Sean is an open-source software researcher and a founding member of the Linux Foundation’s working group on community health analytics for open-source software CHAOSS, co-lead of the CHAOSS metrics software working group, and leader of the open-source metrics tool AUGUR, which can be forked and cloned and experimented with on GitHub. Sean’s other major research project over the past decade, Mission Hydro-Sci, focuses on computational modeling and artificial intelligence for discerning student learning progress in Serious Games.
After a decade as a software engineer, Sean decided his calling was in research. His open-source research is framed around a broader agenda of social computing research, which he pursues as a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Missouri.
Sean also created the Data Science and Analytics Masters program at Missouri, which he’s now passed on to people well-suited for operations. Sean’s publications focus on understanding how social technologies influence organizational, small group, and community dynamics, typically including analysis of electronic trace data from systems combined with the perspectives of people whose behavior is traced. Group Informatics is a methodology and ontology Sean has articulated, intending to help build consensus among researchers and developers on ethically and systematically making sense of electronic trace data. Structural fluidity, a construct Sean developed with his collaborators Peppo Valetto and Kelly Blincoe, aims to make sense of structural dynamics in virtual software organizations and how those dynamics affect performance. Working with Josh Introne, Bryan Semaan, and Ingrid Erickson, Sean elaborates on mechanisms for identifying structural fluidity and organizational dynamics in electronic trace data from an online health forum, using the lens of complex systems theory. His other work includes collaborations with Matt Germonprez on the Open Collaboration Data Exchange and Open Source Health metrics projects. He lives in Columbia, MO, with his wife Kate, two daughters (a third, the oldest, is off getting her Ph.D.), and a dog named Huckleberry.
