N. Sadat Shami

Picture of Sadat Shami

I have successfully defended my PhD dissertation and am now working at IBM TJ Watson Research Center in Cambridge, MA. This website acts as a historical record of my publications and projects while I was a graduate student. I no longer have editing access so this information is outdated. For my current research please visit my homepage at IBM or follow me on Twitter.

I am broadly interested in Human Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, and Computer Mediated Communication. My primary research focus is to draw on theory from the social and behavioral sciences in order to develop a grounded appreciation of how individuals and groups use information technology for information seeking and knowledge sharing. Through such an understanding, I strive to design better systems that support the information seeking and knowledge sharing activities of individuals and groups. I enjoy combining quantitative model building with qualitative data analysis.

Below is a list of my publications and research projects.

Publications | Invited Talks | Invited Participant | Research Projects | Media Coverage

Publications

Refereed journal articles

Refereed conference articles

Refereed conference presentations

Workshops, workshop papers, posters, demos

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Invited Talks

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Invited Participant

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Research Projects

Sensemaking of expertise | K-net expertise recommender system | Affect and group decision making | Distributed teams | Shapefactory organizational simulation | Island Telecom business simulation

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Making sense of strangers' expertise from digital artifacts

This research aims to develop a deeper theoretical understanding of how impressions of expertise of unknown others are formed from digital artifacts. Drawing on sensemaking, signaling, and information foraging theory, as well as Goffman’s work on impression management, I unpack the cues that lead individuals to form impressions based on social computing technologies such as social tags and bookmarks, social network connections, blogs, online forums, and mailing lists. Through a series of studies conducted at a large distributed organization, I examine the mechanisms through which signals inherent in different social software allow individuals to make sense of strangers' expertise. This research has the potential to improve our understanding of how impressions get formed in the absence of face-to-face interaction.

Publications in this stream of research:

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K-net: Sharing expertise through friendship networks

K-net is an expertise recommender system that utilizes friendship networks to locate and recommend expertise in an organization. Utilizing friendship networks to recommend experts is a departure from traditional expertise recommenders. It is not sufficient to just identify experts, it is equally important to ensure that experts respond. Friendship matters. Using friendship networks to recommend experts increases the probability of response. Furthermore, research has found that people enjoy working with a friend over a more competent individual. Drawing on transactive memory theory, K-net allows individuals in an organization to know 'who knows what'. It thus goes beyond recommending experts; it increases awareness of expertise distributed throughout the organization. We are studying how K-net allowed software engineering groups to increase their transactive memory, performance, and sociability.

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Affect and group decision making through CMC

There has been limited research on the impact of mild positive affect on computer mediated group decision making. While the literature has shown that mild positive affect promotes creativity and flexibility in thinking among individuals in face to face settings, the effects on group information processing through computer mediated communication has not been explored. This research looks at how inducing mild positive affect through computer mediated means may impact group information processing.

Publications/Workshops in this stream of research:

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Distributed Teams

Distributed teams are teams that are comprised of individuals located in geographically different locations. Such teams have to depend on technology to collaborate. Rapid advancements in information and communication technology has led to increased use of distributed or virtual teams for collaborating at a distance. This project was an experimental field study of sixty four groups from six universities across North America. We were interested in studying how different geographic distribution and information distribution affected information processing and decision making in these teams.

Publications in this stream of research:

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Shapefactory Organizational Simulation

Shapefactory is an organizational simulation that allows us to understand social dynamics of partially distributed teams. Partially distributed teams have some members collocated, while others participate remotely from a distance. We looked at the formation of in-group/out-groups, the effect of collocation, and the impact of relocation.

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Island Telecom Business Simulation

Island Telecom is an online simulation that was developed at the University of Michigan Business School as a teaching aid for a course on globalization and corporate social responsibility. The simulation exposed students to ethical dilemmas in a globalized world. It was adapted from a face-to-face classroom setting to an online setting where MBA students could log in and interact asynchronously.

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Media Coverage

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Last modified: 15th March 2010