We're pretty flexible, but broadly, the Reimagination Lab is about ways to collect, analyze, and visualize the things people do in new ways that generate both personal and public goods. Often (and this is where the "re" comes in) this involves re-using content they've already created and activities they already engage in. For example:

• Pensieve is about re-using pictures, status messages, blog posts, and even people's paths through the world to help them reminisce, both by themselves and with others.
• Being Heard lets people explore the archives of communication they build up in email and chat to better understand their relationships with other people.
• Goalmometer is about helping visualize, manage, and motivate progress on the goals they are already undertaking.
• SuggestBot is about watching people's editing behavior in Wikipedia, combined with the community's marking of work that needs doing, in order to match people with work they'd like to do, benefitting both them and the community.

We look for problems that have real impact, that have the potential to make people's lives and the world a better place while allowing us to better understand important aspects of human behavior and technology design. We don't always succeed, but we try hard. For more about the people, projects, and publications that live in and come from the lab, you know what do. You can even email Dan Cosley to learn more.

Here's a lovely bit of reimagining from the Extra Ordinary comic, which we keep on our lab door.

• December 14, 2012 - It was a good year for the lab in CHI papers-land. Xuan Zhao, Niloufar Salehi, Sasha Naranjit, Sara Alwaalan, Steve Voida, and Dan Cosley have a CHI 2013 paper around understanding the use of social media data for current performance, long-term exhibition to others, and personal archiving, which is super-sweet. Dan also has papers with Ge Gao, Hao-Chuan Wang, and Sue Fussell on using highlighting to support machine translation, and with Vera Khovanskaya, Eric Baumer, Steve, and Geri Gay on designing personal informatics systems that raise awareness of the underlying infrastructure.
• October 11, 2012 - Hao-Chuan Wang and Tina (Chien Wen) Yuan got full papers accepted at CSCW 2013. Hao-Chuan's, about how machine translation, particularly asymmetric translation, can support multilingual teams. Tina's, about the pressures and problems that immigrants to a new culture and language face when talking informally in their new organization. It's nice getting some cross-cultural work in with Sue Fussell.
• April 10, 2012 - Good news for Amit Sharma, who was selected as a winner of the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges competition this year.
• February 15, 2012 - Good news for Liz Murnane, a first year PhD here who was selected for the MSR Graduate Women's Scholarship for 2012.
• January 30, 2012 - DanCo was selected as a faculty fellow for the Cornell Institute for the Social Sciences for Spring 2013. It's very cool as a recognition of how information science can contribute there, a little feather in my cap, and a chance to go back to the place which, through the collaborations I formed on the Getting Connected: Social Science in the Age of Networks project, is a major reason why I got hired here.
• December 16, 2011 - Xuan Zhao and Victoria Schwanda Sosik got a CHI paper accepted that's a nice followup to the CSCW 2012 paper about how people use social media to think about friendships; here, they're looking at how people in romantic relationships interpret and use social media behaviors to manage their relationships and their other personal goals.
• October 26, 2011 - The official accept for the HCI special issue on designing for personal memories came yesterday, very exciting. Congrats to Victoria Schwanda, Soyoung Lee, Johnathon Schultz, Tejas Peesapati, and all the folks who worked on papers that helped inform it.
• October 22, 2011 - Amit Sharma apparently did a very nice job presenting his network-centric recommenders idea at the 3rd Workshop on Recommender Systems and the Social Web.
• October 18, 2011 -  Victoria Schwanda and Xuan Zhao got themselves a great paper accepted at CSCW about how social media content can help people think about their friendships.
• October 9, 2011 -  SocialCom went well, fun smaller conference. People were fairly interested in OJ Zhou and Tiffany Ng's pieTime work, and Amit Sharma did a fine job with his presentation of the PopCore recommender in Facebook, which is very cool.