Gary Monroe Olson, Ph.D. - US grants

This project examines how a small group of collaborators works together to design software requirements, and what impact--good or bad--the use of groupware (integrated hardware/software for group processes) might have on this process. Scientists from the University of Michigan will cooperate with colleagues from the Software Technology Program at Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) and Arthur Andersen & Co. The specific projects represent the blending of skills in the building of computer systems, the empirical analysis of human behavior, and the application of theory, both from technology and from cognitive science, to the design and analysis of technology augmentations of work. The approach stresses the need to use a vision of future technology environments to navigate the design space of collaborative technology, but uses the science base of behavioral science on the one hand and computer science and information systems on the other to assist in the development of technology experiments. The research will pursue the following specific activities: Studies of current practice-- 1. An analysis of collaboration from interview data already collected by MCC 2. Observational studies of collaboration as they occur now; Studies of groupware supported collaboration-- 3. Studies of collaboration using MCC groupware prototypes 4. Studies of collaboration using University of Michigan groupware prototypes. The project will use observational methods to study group behavior in situ, and will use successive generations of groupware prototypes as experimental tools for better understanding the collaborative process itself. The goal of the project is to contribute to the science base of collaboration theory, which is a blend of the behavioral sciences and the computer and information sciences interested in understanding how autonomous agents coordinate their behavior in the pursuit of a common task.

This is a grant to conduct a workshop composed of NSF grantees whose awards were made in the new area of inter-disciplinary research known as Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology (CTCT). The purposes of the workshop are: First, to provide a forum for the exchange of knowledge in the form of perspectives, findings, methods and theory for this young, interdisciplinary field. Second, to provide an opportunity for the field to coalesce and grow. While certain subsets of the community of the researchers mingle at various professional meetings, as a whole, these investigators do not have regular contact. Third, this provides an opportunity for the research from these projects to be made more visible to the Washington based research funding and policy community. This workshop represents a planning opportunity for the IT&O Program. The future research agenda for CT2 funding and community building is an important part of the workshop program. The workshop is held on July 8 through July 10, 1992 in Washington, DC. A workshop report will be prepared and made available through publications and in response to requests.

The goal of this workshop is to explore the new emerging view that the mind must be viewed in its social and physical context. In this view, the processes and representations of the internal cognitive system are tightly coupled with processes and representations in the external world. In other words, cognition is not about the mind in isolation, but the mind tightly coupled with the external world that consists of the natural environment, designed artifacts, the social environment, the organizational environment, and the cultural environment. The workshop will convene representatives of a number of specific lines of work that converge on this view, including situated action, distributed cognition, cultural psychology, everyday cognition, activity views of the mind, the study of errors, and studies of applications like human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. Such disciplines as artificial intelligence, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy are all active in these debates. The outcome will include a report for the National Science Foundation's planning for a Cognitive Science Initiative.

This is a cooperative agreement to fund a multidisciplinary effort linking research in computer science, behavioral science, and upper atmospheric and space science to build a prototype system for a distributed but shared working environment: the vision of a collaboratory. This effort conceives, develops, deploys, tests, evaluates, and integrates a high performance group centered computing environment into the collaborative experimental and modeling activities ongoing in the upper atmospheric research community. The upper atmospheric researchers here are a collaborating group engaged in observational activities using a variety of instruments located at the Sondre Stromfjord, Greenland upper atmospheric research facility. Many of these activities are directed at rare or intermittent phenomena requiring real time control of instruments by the scientists observing the changing conditions. This is presently accomplished by visits to the remote facility. To prototype test and evaluate the distributed tools for collaboration, research under this agreement will develop a user- oriented, rapid prototyping testbed built around the Sondre Stromfjord facility and its user community. Testing and evaluation of the prototype tools will involve measurements of human behavior. This research will add to the understanding of effective use of collaboration tools by performing studies of use and effectiveness of these tools among the testbed users. The Sondre Stromfjord researchers expect to obtain greater efficiency in joint experimental operations, analysis, and discovery by guiding the requirements for the collaboration environment which they will utilize to support their research.//

This is an award to fund a workshop composed of NSF grantees whose awards were made in the two years of competitions under the Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology (CTCT) Initiative and grantees of subsequent awards in these fields. The total number of grants involved is thirty-three, an increase of eight from last year. This year, awardees whose research is in robotic coordination will also participate. Those awards made from the Robotics and Machine Intelligence Program constitute evidence of the growth of the field into other program funding domains. The purposes of the workshop are: First, to provide a forum for the exchange of knowledge in the form of perspectives, findings, methods and theory for this young, interdisciplinary field. Second, to provide an opportunity for the field to coalesce and grow. While certain subsets of the community of researchers mingle at various professional meetings, as a whole, these investigators do not have regular contact. The workshop provides an opportunity to establish an identity for the area of work and to plan subsequent activities. Third, this provides an opportunity for the research from these projects to be made more visible to the Washington-based research funding and policy community. This workshop represents a planning opportunity for the IT&O Program. The future research agenda for CTCT funding and community-building is an important part of the workshop program. The workshop will be held on July 8-10, 1993 in Arlington, Virginia. A workshop report will be prepared and made available. //

A workshop on the general topic of Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology whose purpose is to examine current trends and new directions in this broad area. The workshop will be held in Ann Arbor, Michigan from November 18-20, 1994. The 30 scientists invited to the workshop will be drawn from the former CTCT NSF grantee community and from those outside the NSF family of CTCT grantees who are leading thinkers and researchers who could help explore and define new directions in this area.

The goal of this project is to guide the building of appropriate technology to support the work of small groups. The strategy is to interleave empirical work with theory building, and field work with lab work. The field of research provides baseline data about how small groups work on specific tasks. Further, the field data helps suggest the kind of groupware that might assist that kind of work. Tasks that mimic the key aspects of behavior in the field have been developed for use in the lab. These are used to explore the value of various forms of groupware support for both face-to-face and distributed work. Different forms of audio and video support are also investigated for distributed work. The empirical work is used to evolve a conceptual framework in which characteristics of the group, the task, and the technology are related.

Collaborative Knowledge-Work Environments for Team
Science: The Space Physics and Aeronomy Research
Collaboratory (SPARC) Project

Project Summary

Interdisciplinary research experience in the collaboratory concept will be used to design, deploy, evaluate, and enlarge the fundamental understanding of collaborative knowledge-work environments. They will focus and inform this research by the creation of a Space Physics and Aeronomy Research Collaboratory (SPARC) of revolutionary scope and power. The work is based on the Upper Atmospheric Research Collaboratory (UARC), in which over a six-year period a team of space physicists, computer scientists, and behavioral scientists evolved a suite of collaboration capabilities to provide rich, real-time access to a wide variety of data and modeling resources. The proposed work on SPARC will significantly extend the power of technology-mediated, distributed knowledge-networking systems. It combines experimental data streams and their interpretation, theoretical models, real-time campaign support, capture mid replay of collaborative sessions, post-hoc analysis workshops, access to archival data and digital libraries, and educational/outreach modules. An important outcome of SPARC for the science community will be a functional and operational space weather predictive capability. Equally important, SPARC will also be a major testbed to further understand and design collaborative knowledge work systems from a merger of social and technical principles.

The SPARC project aims to produce a next generation collaboratory that will support a fill range of scientific activities

More and more organizations are attempting to work long distance. Since travel is time consuming, exhausting, and costly, they are turning to remote technologies, such as video and audio-conferencing. High quality video, of course, is much more expensive than audio, and questions arise as to its efficacy and necessity. This proposal asks two broad questions:

1. Under what conditions/tasks is the addition of video over audio truly beneficial?
2. What effect do various conditions of video degradation have on user performance?

The research focuses on the effect of the presence or absence of video on tasks deemed key to long-term teams, involving the establishment and maintenance of trust and the detection of deception. In addition, we test how various reasonable degradations of the channels, those commonly used in making the cost of the connection cheaper, change people's behavior in these situations. This work has both theoretical and practical import. Theoretically, it reveals which cues people use when they engage in important social interactions that underlie task-related activities. Practically, we will be able to provide advice for people who might find themselves in situations involving the building of trust or the detection of lying when that interaction is done remotely.

Collaboratories are new organizational forms to help scientists who are geographically dispersed to work closely together. A number of collaboratories have been built, and their successes and failures have been due to a combination of technical and social factors not yet fully synthesized. This project will define, abstract, and codify the underlying technical and social mechanisms that lead to successful collaboratories. It will provide the vocabulary, associated principles, and design methods for propagating and sustaining collaboratories across a wide range of circumstances. This project will enhance both the practice of science and the training of new scientists. These goals will be achieved through three coordinated activities: (1) The qualitative and quantitative study of collaboratory design and usage, examining both technical and social aspects of performance; (2) creation and maintenance of a Collaboratory Knowledge Base, a Web-accessible archive of primary source material, summaries and abstracts, and relevant generalizations and principles, a database of collaboratory resources, and other related material; and (3) the abstraction and codification of principles, heuristics, and frameworks to guide the rapid creation and deployment of successful collaboratories, including principles of design or customization.

This symposium will bring together about thirty leading thinkers and policy makers in several related areas of cyberinfrastructure for science, including scientific collaboratories, grid computing, and e-science environments. The goal is to bring together international representatives of these movements and communities to better create mutual awareness and understanding and to accelerate research, development, and deployment of these new environments to support science. A related objective is to articulate both the technical and social/organizational prerequisites for success in these endeavors. This nascent movement has profound implications for science education, for education and research in the humanities and for the future of the entire higher education enterprise.

This award supports a research consortium (workshop) of promising doctoral students and distinguished research faculty in the field of human-computer interaction. The consortium will be held in conjunction with the ACM 2002 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2002) in Minneapolis, Minnesota, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Human Computer Interaction (SIGCHI). The goals of the workshop include building a cohort group of new researchers who will then have a network of colleagues spread out across the world, guiding the work of new researchers by having experts in the research field give them advice, and making it possible for promising new entrants to the field to attend their research conference. Student participants will make formal presentations of their work during the workshop, and will receive feedback from the faculty panel. The feedback is geared to helping students understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to other human-computer interaction research, whether their topics are adequately focused for thesis research projects, whether their methods are correctly chosen and applied, and whether their results are appropriately analyzed and presented. Student participants will also present their work during the technical program of the CHI 2002 conference. Extended abstracts of the students' work will be disseminated via publication in the CHI 2002 Extended Abstracts, which has wide print and electronic distribution. Evaluation of the consortium will be conducted by ACM SIGCHI's conference management committee, and results of the evaluation will be available to the organizers of future consortia.

Human-Computer Interaction is a multidisciplinary field of increasing importance to science, commerce, and society. This workshop contributes to the professional development of young scientists, whose professional careers will be devoted to understanding how computer systems and software can be designed to serve the needs of users.

In today's organizations, many people have to work together even though they are not collocated, using email, video and audio conferencing, voicemail, etc. Remote team members typically feel that they suffer from having not only less contact overall, but less rich information as well. How much of a disadvantage do remote people have compared to those who are collocated? How much productivity, trust and social capital is lost? This program of research measures various losses using a new research vehicle, the long-term organizational simulation. Participants engage in a task in which they simulate buying and selling things to each other in a competitive market for weeks at a time. In the course of buying and selling, they form impressions of each other, make long standing deals, favor some suppliers over others with speedy reactions and lower prices. Various theories predict how the losses will vary when the numbers of remote people and their locations vary, and how various interventions will help. This research will not only allow us to sort out predictions of some major theories of relationship formation and social capital, but will advise managers of distributed teams how to improve efficiency, effectiveness and the morale of these teams.

This SGER project will investigate the socially optimal tradeoffs between open and closed software licensing. In the context of software development, where there are complex interactions among economic vs. non-economic and controlled vs. free access, this work seeks to articulate the best use of software licenses that balance legitimate business interests against public interest in enhanced social welfare. There are two kinds of scientific contribution. The first is an expanded theory of two-sided network effects that explores how opening a software platform to complementary investment can benefit both those who develop and those who consume. Under this framework, a set of model parameters might be tuned so as to generalize certain existing licenses, while suggesting an opportunity space for new kinds of licenses. The second contribution is the coding of a browser-accessible model that allows dynamic simulation of the many tradeoffs involved. Openness of the models and deliverables help ensure relevance and accuracy of results. The social benefit of successful output is the potential to improve the quantity, accessibility, and growth of software, a valuable resource for users and developers, non-profits and for-profits alike.

This proposal is for two workshops on "Management and Models for Cyberinfrastructure." The report, Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure, provides a broad vision of the future of science and engineering research. The path forward that this report envisions - extensive cyberinfrastructure to enable all levels of science & engineering research and education, geographic and institution independence, cross-disciplinary sharing of data and insights, and technical depth in all dimensions - truly has the potential to revolutionize all fields of research and education. In addition to the sound advice offered in the report on the organizational issues that NSF may face in implementing the report's recommendations, there is also a need to examine the various models that might be relevant to the management and oversight of such large-scale, ubiquitous, comprehensive digital environments, which include distributed resources, federated facilities, people, data, information and tools. Input and lessons learned are needed from key stakeholders and other principals experienced in the management and oversight of such complex enterprises. The central objective of these workshops is to articulate the array of organizational models for large-scale, federated, distributed scientific organizations that NSF can consider employing for cyberinfrastructure. The benefits, detriments and possible innovations of each model should be analyzed from several points of view including 1) governance issues, 2) oversight potential, 3) operational effectiveness, 4) economic efficiency, and 5) knowledge production potential. In addition, several town hall meetings will be held to insure that all stakeholders are included.

This is funding to support this year's HCI doctoral research consortium (workshop) of approximately 15 promising doctoral students from the United States and abroad, along with distinguished research faculty. The event will take place in conjunction with the ACM 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2004), to be held April 24-29 in Vienna, Austria, and sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Human Computer Interaction (SIGCHI). Goals of the workshop include building a cohort group of new researchers who will then have a network of colleagues spread out across the world, guiding the work of new researchers by having experts in the research field give them advice, and making it possible for promising new entrants to the field to attend their research conference. Student participants will make formal presentations of their work during the workshop, and will receive feedback from the faculty panel. The feedback is geared to helping students understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to other human-computer interaction research, whether their topics are adequately focused for thesis research projects, whether their methods are correctly chosen and applied, and whether their results are appropriately analyzed and presented. Student participants will present their work to the doctoral consortium on April 25-26, with follow up activities to be held during the technical program of the CHI 2004 conference. Extended abstracts of the students' work will be published in the CHI 2004 Extended Abstracts, which has wide print and electronic distribution. SIGCHI's conference management committee will evaluate the doctoral consortium, and the results made available to the organizers of future consortia. The CHI doctoral consortia, which began in 1986, have been highly successful in providing a forum for the initial socialization into the field of young doctoral scholars, and many of today's leading HCI researchers participated as students in earlier consortia.

Broader Impacts: The annual CHI doctoral consortia traditionally bring together the best of the next generation of HCI researchers, allowing them to create a social network both among themselves and with senior researchers at a critical stage in their professional development. Because the students and faculty constitute a diverse group across a variety of dimensions, including nationality/cultural and scientific discipline, the students' horizons are broadened to the future benefit of the field.

Thomas A. Finholt, University of Michigan
06-36300
CI-TEAM Implementation Project: Using Cyberinfrastructure to Develop Next Generation Civil Infrastructure

Many scientists and engineers would like to realize the advantages envisioned by the NSF blue-ribbon panel on cyberinfrastructure (Atkins et al. 2003), but struggle to identify best practices and tools. To address this need our CI-TEAM implementation project will enable and analyze the use of Sakai, an open-source collaboration and learning environment, by an international community of researchers focused on engineered cementitious composities (ECC). Through evaluation of the ECC community's experience we will produce lessons-learned that can be extended to other scientific and engineering communities. These lessons include improved coordination of joint activity at a distance, more effective transfer of procedural knowledge across distributed sites, and accelerated practical application of research findings. A key intellectual contribution of this project is demonstration of how to realize benefits of CI-based tools without special individual or organizational circumstances, such as dependence on CI-savvy individuals.

In terms of broader impacts, our project will expand use of ECC in civil infrastructure systems (e.g., bridges, tunnels, roadways, pipelines) with a corresponding decrease in the vulnerability of these systems due to deterioration through normal wear-and-tear or catastrophic events like earthquakes. Additionally, our project will inspire and motivate researchers to organize more activity via cyberinfrastructure where barriers to participation are reduced. For example, students are able to interact directly with leading reseachers via blog, chat and discussion tools that are included in Sakai. Finally, our project will show how cyberinfrastructure can be used to increase interest among women, underrepresented minorities, and the general public in cutting edge research on next generation civil infrastructure.