Interpersonal Attention in Virtual Organizations: Exploring the Use and Display of Awareness Information
Title: Interpersonal Attention in Virtual Organizations: Exploring the Use and Display of Awareness Information
Speaker: Dr. Jeremy Birnholtz, Cornell University
Date:
Time: 3:30pm
Place: Thorvaldson 105
Abstract:
Virtual organizations - aggregations of individuals, facilities and resources that span geographic and institutional boundaries – are an increasingly common work structure in research and industry. Members of VOs, however, often cannot work together as effectively as those who are collocated.
One key reason for this is the difficulty of opportunistic, informal interactions in VOs. In this talk, I will discuss results from studies aiming to improve support for these interactions via focus on attention and perception. One study explores people’s usage of a novel instant messaging client that provides awareness of others’ activities at varying levels of detail. Others examine how people notice and respond to awareness information that is displayed in the visual periphery, so as to attract attention only when necessary. Biography:
Jeremy Birnholtz is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and the Faculty of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University, as well as the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. His research aims to improve the usefulness and usability of communication and collaboration tools, via a focus on understanding and exploiting mechanisms of human attention. Jeremy’s work has been published in the ACM CHI, CSCW and Group Proceedings, as well as in Organization Science and JASIST. His current research is supported by the US National Science Foundation, the US Department of Agriculture, and Google.
