Information Science Breakfast Series

Jan 25

IS Colloquium -- no IS Breakfast

Feb 1

Feb 8

Sadat Shami

Making sense of strangers' expertise from digital artifacts

In organizations, individuals typically rely on their personal networks to obtain expertise when faced with ill-defined problems that require answers that are beyond the scope of their own knowledge. However, individuals cannot always get the needed expertise from their local colleagues. This issue is particularly acute for members in large geographically dispersed organizations since it is difficult to know 'who knows what' among numerous colleagues. The proliferation of social computing technologies such as blogs, online forums, social tags and bookmarks, and social network connection information have expanded the reach and ease at which knowledge workers may become aware of others expertise. While all these technologies facilitate access to a stranger that can potentially provide needed expertise or advice, there has been little theoretical work on how individuals actually go about this process. I define the process of gathering complex, changing and potentially equivocal information, and comprehending it by connecting nuggets of information from many sources to answer vague, non-procedural questions as the process of 'sensemaking'. Through a study of 81 fulltime employees in 21 countries, I look at how existing theories of sensemaking and information search may be inadequate to describe the 'people sensemaking' process individuals go through when considering contacting strangers for expertise. Using signaling theory as a conceptual framework, I describe how certain 'signals' in various social software are hard to fake, and are thus more reliable indicators of expertise, approachability, and responsiveness. This research has the potential to inform theories of sensemaking and information search when the search is for people, as opposed to documents.

** This is a practice talk for a job talk at IBM TJ Watson Research Center, Cambridge, MA.

Feb 15

Phoebe Sengers and Kirsten Boehner

Representation and Response

Information technologies are often designed based on a metaphor of one-to-one correspondence between internal representations and the world of human activity. This metaphor structures commonly-chosen strategies for design (i.e., sense, represent, and manipulate symbolic states corresponding to real-world entities) and evaluation (i.e., check whether the internal representation is a true representation of the human world). Yet at least since roboticist Rodney Brooks's cry that "the world is its own best representation" led to walking robotic insects in the 1980's, questions have been raised not only about the accuracy but also the value of designing systems by explicitly modeling the environment in which they will be embedded.

Using examples from what Boedker terms 'third wave' HCI research, I will explore the implications for HCI of explicitly and systematically shifting from a metaphor of representation to one of response. What design strategies are useful if we shift from accurately acquiring, representing, and reasoning about human activity to responding evocatively to human activity? How can we evaluate the resulting systems if we no longer count on them to have correctly understood and processed human activity? I will argue that not only our methods, but our notion of HCI as a science must be rethought. .

Note: This talk is a synopsis of a chapter in our forthcoming book on critically oriented systems design.

Feb 22

Kate Ehrlich, IBM Research, TJ Watson

Coordination gaps and the implications for improving communication in distributed software teams

In software development projects, dependencies between software artifacts establish the need for developers to coordinate their work. Research by Cataldo et al. (2006) used network analysis to demonstrate that congruence between coordination requirements and coordination activities reduced development time. We have extended and generalized this work by using graph theoretical algorithms to identify gaps as well as congruence instances in the communication network. These gaps are ranked in terms of their contribution to the congruence measurement for the whole system. This is useful for isolating the most important social network links to promote while attempting to avoid "communication overload." We have applied our method to historical data from a software development project. Analysis reveals that the distribution of gaps across the project follows a power law implying that a small percentage of links have the most impact on congruence. We also analyzed the data for collocated and distributed pairs of people and found that distributed pairs had more communication gaps. The talk will discuss the implications of these findings for systematically linking communication networks to task dependencies.

Bio: Kate is a researcher in the Collaborative User Experience group at IBM Research where she uses Social Network Analysis as a research and consulting tool to gain insights into patterns of collaboration in distributed teams. She has a B.Sc in Psychology from the University of London and a PhD. in Cognitive Science from the University of Sussex, UK. She did post-doctoral work in cognitive science at University of Texas, University of Massachusetts and Yale. Kate has been active in several professional societies including the ACM SIG on Human Computer Interaction where she was papers co-chair and founder of the Boston chapter.

Feb 29

IS Roundtable - DGS Thorsten Joachims + IS graduate students

Thursday Mar 6 3-4pm

Jenn Thom-Santelli

Social Tagging Roles: Publishers, Evangelists, Leaders

Social tagging systems provide users with the opportunity to employ tags in a communicative manner. To explore the use of tags for communication in these systems, we report results from 33 user interviews and employ the concept of social roles to describe audience-oriented tagging, including roles of community-seeker, community-builder, evangelist, publisher, and team-leader. These roles contribute to our understanding of the motivations and rationales behind social tagging in an international company, and suggest new features and services to support social software in the enterprise.

Joint work with Michael J. Muller and David R. Millen, IBM Research

This is a practice talk for a presentation at CHI.

Mar 14

Jeremy Birnholtz

Attention By Proxy? Issues in Audience Awareness for Webcasts to Distributed Groups

Abstract:
Instructor/student interaction in e-learning environments can positively impact both student learning and instructor satisfaction. In online webcast lectures, however, interaction can be difficult because instructors lack basic awareness information about their remote students. Our goal is to better understand the kinds of awareness information that instructors should have if they are to interact frequently and effectively with their students in e-learning environments. We conducted an exploratory study – via interviews and observations – of instructor attention in face-to-face classrooms at a large university. Our results imply that a webcast system should provide instructors with overview and detailed data about their students, but that this detailed information should not be displayed publicly.

OpenMessenger: Supporting Multiple Levels of Awareness and Notification in Distributed Workgroups

Abstract:
This paper describes OpenMessenger, an awareness and instant messaging client designed to address and explore the difficult tension between awareness and privacy when it comes to supporting informal interaction in distributed groups. While awareness requires information about what others are doing, too much information can be distracting and raise privacy concerns. Based on field data gathered in open-plan office spaces, OpenMessenger mediates this tension by allowing for gradual engagement with others. In other words, it allows for multiple levels of awareness information to be distributed, and provides notification to those about whom information is being gathered. Preliminary evaluation data are presented suggesting the utility of the approach, but also pointing to directions for future work.

This will be a practice talk for two short (10min) CHI presentations.

Mar 21

Spring break

Mar 28

Sadat Shami
Gilly Leshed

Sadat's talk:
Pick Me! Link Selection in Expertise Search Results

Abstract: Expertise locator systems have been designed to help find experts within organizations. While there are many examples of these systems in the literature, there has not been any systematic analysis of the factors that predict whether a particular expertise search result will be selected for further exploration. This paper describes a study of 67 employees from 21 countries that performed a specific expertise search to find an expert using an expertise locator system. Rank order and social connection information displayed in snippets of search results were found to significantly predict whether a user considers a particular search result for further exploration. Implications for the design of expertise location systems and future research directions are discussed.

Joint work with Kate Ehrlich and David Millen, IBM Research

Gilly's talk:
In-Car GPS Navigation: Engagement with and Disengagement from the Environment

Abstract: Although in-car GPS navigation technology is proliferating, it is not well understood how its use alters the ways people interpret their environment and navigate through it. We argue that GPS-based car navigation might disengage people from their surrounding environment, but also has the potential to open up novel ways to engage with it. We present an ethnographically-informed study with GPS users, showing evidence for practices of disengagement as well as new opportunities for engagement, illustrating our findings using rich descriptions from the field. Grounded in our observations we propose design principles for GPS systems that support richer experiences of driving. We argue that for a fuller understanding of issues of disengagement and engagement with the environment we need to move beyond a focus on the (re)design of GPS devices, and point to future directions of work that embrace a broader perspective.

Joint work with Theresa Velden, Oya Rieger, Blazej Kot, and Phoebe Sengers.

Apr 4

Apr 11

Apr 18

Nick Knouf

Crossing Boundaries in Differing Contexts: Interdisciplinary Work Within Oneself

This talk is going to consist of a series of narratives about a current project of mine called "Fluid Nexus" (http://fluidnexus.net), a mobile phone application designed to allow messaging without the use of a centralized mobile phone network.  Specifically, I will examine the fluidity of the object through a variety of contexts and the way this fluidity can be seen as a political means of enacting different realities.  Throughout I will highlight the particular difficulties involved when someone (meaning me) is implicated in both the development and study of the object.

This work---both the development of the object and the methodology of its study---is in its early stages and so I will welcome all thoughts and suggestions.

Apr 25

Stephen Purpura

Finding Concepts in Text: The Challenges for Political Research

Five years ago, I asked the question of political researchers: "How do people synthesize information to choose a President? (and correspondingly, how do politicians use information dispersion to reach the people?)" Five years later, I find the answers from political research still unsatisfying.
As a step towards a better understanding of the bidirectional information exchange between people and elected representatives, I've begun to examine design requirements for quantizing the information exchange. In this context, quantizing is defined as a reliable process of condensing seemingly qualitative concepts from human communication to a quantitative representation. It can be distinguished from traditional context analysis methods in political communications research by an initial focus on reliability and repeatability over expressiveness.
Once the information is quantized, it can function as an input to more complex models of game theory and human behavior. But, as a part of model development, researchers need tools to "soak and poke" (conduct qualitative review of the quantitative distinctions). Such tools include my SMARTER information retrieval prototype, which enables document search by ranking results relative to complex topics instead of the methods typically employed by information retrieval systems such as Google, THOMAS, or Lucene. When such tools are available, the result is a mixed-method research process which both increases researcher productivity and improves the quality of the underlying research.
This talk builds on my past research, but I consider it in its early stages and so I will welcome all thoughts and suggestions. For further information, see one of the foundational pieces for this talk: Hillard, D. Purpura, S. Wilkerson, J. "Computer Assisted Topic Classification for Mixed Methods Social Science Research". Journal of Information Technology and Politics 4:4.

May 2

Meeting IS Chair Dan Huttenlocher + DGS Thorsten Joachims + IS graduate students