Dr. Cosley's main interest is helping people make sense of and manage information, both individually and as groups. More recently this has grown to include leveraging people's current behaviors online, along with social science theory, to produce individual and social goods that otherwise would not have been created.
Dr. Cosley's prior work focused on recommender systems, especially new ways to use recommendation algorithms, better interfaces for recommender systems, and better methods for evaluating their utility. He also helped teach Google how to play "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" As a systems builder, he developed the SuggestBot tool for Wikipedia, played an important role in building the successful research recommendation system MovieLens (http://movielens.umn.edu/), and developed the SmartShopper, a successful mobile shopping list application.
