Ronald E Robertson I design experiments and software to study the ways in which humans and algorithms interact in digital spaces, especially as they pertain to information seeking. Currently, I am a research scientist at the Stanford Internet Observatory. Before coming to Stanford, I completed my PhD in Network Science at Northeastern University, and was lucky to be advised by Christo Wilson, a computer scientist, and David Lazer, a political scientist. Prior to that, I worked with research psychologist Robert Epstein at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT).
My research aims to help us better understand the intersection of user choice, algorithmic curation, and choice architecture in online platforms, and has been published in top journals, including Nature, Science Advances, PNAS, and in conference proceedings, such as the Proceedings of the ACM: Human-Computer Interaction, the Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW), and Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). While conducting these studies, I helped build a nonprofit research institute, completed my PhD at Northeastern, interned at Microsoft Research NY, and led or contributed to a wide range of other research projects on the impact of technology on society. A list of citations and links to my published research is available here, and my Curriculum Vitae (CV) is available as a PDF here.
While conducting my research, I also developed a number of tools that I have publicly released, including WebSearcher for collecting and parsing web search engine results, and suggests for collecting and analyzing search engine autocomplete suggestions. These packages and others are listed with links here.
Feel free to drop me a line at rer[at]acm.org if you'd like to get in touch.