Paul Resnick is the Michael D. Cohen Collegiate Professor of Information at the University of Michigan School of Information, where he directs the Center for Social Media Responsibility.
Resnick was a pioneer in the field of recommender systems (sometimes called collaborative filtering) and reputation systems. Recommender systems guide people to interesting materials based on evaluations from other people. Reputation systems are recommender systems for people and organizations; the expectation of shared evaluations creates incentives for good behavior.
The GroupLens system he helped develop was awarded the 2010 ACM Software Systems Award. His articles have appeared in Scientific American, Wired, Communications of the ACM, The American Economic Review, Management Science, and many other venues. His 2012 MIT Press book (co-authored with Robert Kraut), was titled “Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-based Social Design”.
His current research focuses on large-scale empirical measurements of desirable and undersirable online behaviors, and the development of tools and algorithms that reduce affective polarization.