The involvement of youngsters in online communities today is qualitatively, not quantitatively, different than it was a generation ago.

I think in my work that one of the ways in which we elicit trust in a human is to have the machine demonstrate trustworthy behaviors of the kind that humans are used to.

For young technology enthusiasts, involvement might not mean attending meetings in school gymnasiums or sitting around campfires. Their social or civic engagement may take place in online communities in the glow of their home computer screens.

I think that it's possible to study human intelligence, to know what it's made up of, to break it down into modules in a sense, and then -- little by little -- to build those modules into machines. And that's part of what I do.

It tells you what people have in their heads. As such, it is a clear window into what they're thinking.

While other studies have reported that leadership in the online world is similar to leadership in the off-line or physical world, those studies have been based on the behaviors of adult technology users. We have found that young leaders using technology do not necessarily reproduce adult styles of leadership.