F. D. Smith, Ph.D. - US grants

This research is funded under the Special Initiative on Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology. This is one of eleven winners under that competition. The central focus of this research is experimental observation of groups doing real collaborative work and using systems and communications media explicitly designed to aid in their tasks. Expected results are to expand understanding of how people collaborate and how to design systems that augment collaborative activities. To this end the project has five interdependent components: 1) a theoretical foundation for observing and understanding the social and cognitive aspects of group collaborations; 2) tools for rapid prototyping and reconfiguration of application environments for use by working groups, and multi- media communications to support multi-person interactions; 3) protocol analysis tools to record and study how individuals and groups interact through the networked computer environment; 4) application testbed systems (generic and domain specific) that can be used by groups engaged in real work; and 5) group studies and experiments to test systems, social and cognitive hypotheses.