Research
Below are some interesting tidbits about research projects I'm currently on or worked on in the past. To read more about current projects, try the posts tagged "research" here on my blog. You'll also find some research statements on my Publications page. I'm a member of Dr. Stephanie D. Teasley's lab, and you can learn more about our lab at our website.
Current Projects
Joining a Virtual Organization: A Multi-Method Study of Newcomers to Established Collaborations
One of NSF's Virtual Organizations grants, this study focuses on post docs joining virtual science and engineering teams. The objectives of the project are (1) to better understand under what general conditions Post-Doctoral Fellows are successful and (2) to identify social and technical barriers for Post-Doctoral Fellows entering virtual organizations. Starting in the Fall of 2009, I will be a Post Doc on this grant, a true participant observer working on a distributed science team.
Click here to read the abstract from NSF's site
Visualizing Activity in Online Discussions
In this project, we are developing and testing a set of visualization tools that allow instructors and students to see their discussions in an online learning environment differently. Our goals are (a) to make discussion participation more apparent and measurable for instructors and (b) to explore the impacts of visualization on participation. We use an online learning environment because the data is readily available, and we will easily be able to run a field experiment that allows us to compare participation in courses with and without the visualization tools. Our broader interests are in discussion participation, social performance, and mechanisms for increasing participation in discussions. My interest here builds on my earlier work with MessagePlus - another attempt to help people make sense of online discussions.
Sustainbility Games: Group Dynamics and Manager Education
Humans are resource obese – our use of natural resources exceeds our need – and this gluttony has troubling consequences for the sustainability of worldwide economic health and quality of life. Managers and leaders must make decisions about resource conflicts where clear, best outcomes are unavailable. Because decisions about resources impact many groups, the managers of these groups – e.g., city planners, utility suppliers, and business owners – must work collaboratively to decide how to appropriately allocate and manage natural resources such as water. The Sustainability Game Studies (SGS) research project explores how we may be able to use a collaborative simulation to understand and encourage sustainable decision making under uncertainty.
The SGS will produce
- basic research findings about collaborative decision making under uncertainty,
- improved decision support tools, and
- exercises for use in management education.
SGS’s main activities are experiments that require participants to assume various stakeholder roles and to collaboratively make water policy decisions. In these experiments, we employ WaterSim, a robust modeling tool developed at the Decision Center for Desert Cities (DCDC). WaterSim enables users to explore the impacts of population growth, climate change, and policies on water use and availability. SGS experiments ask participants to assume roles such as city planner, business owner, home owners’ association president, and tribal leader and to use WaterSim to make collaborative decisions about how best to allocate and regulate water use in central Arizona.
Data from the SGS experiments will improve our understanding of a number of aspects of decision making under uncertainty including:
- group behavior in collaborative decision-making processes,
- the effects of individual characteristics on group decision-making,
- the impacts of visual information on group decision-making,
- the use and limitations of interactive models in decision-making, and
- how to develop simulation activities that help train managers to make sustainable decisions.
The SGS project is a collaborative effort that includes researchers and developers from across Arizona State University, including DCDC, the Decision Theatre, the School of Public Affairs, and the W.P. Carey School of Business.
My Dissertation
Building Bridges: A Study of Coordination in Projects
Projects are an increasingly common collaborative arrangement used within and between organizations. For instance, organizations use projects to make films, to build buildings, and to develop new vaccines. Project structures vary across organizations but share a few common elements; for instance, they are temporary and collaborative. Using data from a construction research project – the Woods Avenue Bridge (WAB) Project – this dissertation develops the concept of “adaptive capacity,” a set of abilities a project team accumulates that allows them to adjust their work to manage uncertain and unpredictable changes in their environment.
In order to gain an understanding of the work accomplished in the WAB Project, I rely on data gathered during interviews with researchers, MDOT employees, and contractors and archival documents produced during the project. Participants credited the success of the project to social and adaptive aspects of the project’s management and coordination – how relationships among project members were managed and how people were able to adapt to suit changing conditions and schedules.
Perspective taking, the ability to put oneself in the place of another and to recognize that others may have views different from one’s own, characterized many interactions among WAB Project team members. This perspective taking afforded positive relationships among project team members. Regular meetings during which proactivity and communication were stressed helped the project team stay abreast of others’ work, its impacts on their own, and on the project’s schedule. The project team also employed a number of shared artifacts including contracts and special provisions to develop shared understandings of their practices and dependencies. In summary, positive social interactions within the collaboration, strong social ties, shared understandings, and the adaptive capacity these abilities developed enabled the WAB Project team to adjust to changes in their environment such as schedule changes and unfamiliar practices required for working with new materials. Adaptive capacity serves as a resource for accomplishing the coordination necessary for a collaborative project to succeed. The concept of adaptive capacity helps improve our understanding of the resources collaborative teams develop that make it possible for them to find flexible and creative solutions to their coordination problems.
Read my whole dissertation
Download my dissertation defense talk, including my talk script
Past Projects
Using Cyberinfrastructure to Develop Next Generation Civil Infrastructure
One of NSF's CI-TEAM grants, this study is a collaboration between School of Information faculty (and me) and faculty and students from the College of Engineering. We'll be exploring how to move a new material (engineering cementious composites - a.k.a. bendable concrete) into building code and eventually into construction practice. To do so, we need to understand how best to test the material to meet U.S. standards for building material, how to transfer the practices of making and working with the composites from lab to field, how to encourage diffusion of innovations in communities of practice, and few more things we haven't thought about yet.
Click here to see the project's abstract from NSF's site
Onboarding in Distributed Software Teams
I spent the summer of 2008 working with Andrew Begel in the Human Interactions in Programming group at Microsoft Research. We conducted a qualitative study of software teams at Microsoft who had hired their first remote employee. Our goals were to understand the remote onboarding experience and to ease transitions for new employees and their teams. We found that communication technology and management style had significant effects on how these teams worked together and what they were able to accomplish.
Click here to read our extended abstract for CSCW 2008
Wikis in Organizations
This is a new set of projects exploring the use of wikis by exisiting physical organizations. The first publication to come from the project is a note Jude Yew and I wrote for the GROUP Conference. I'll be presenting there in November. We're currently planning the next stages of the KNOW SI study (of the School of Infomation wiki) and possibilities for other wikis to study.
Click here to read our GROUP paper
Poetry in Motion
The Poetry in Motion study was a pilot project for my Visuospatial Cognition class, and I conducted a web-based experiment to compare a static view of a poem with an animated version of the same poem to see whether the animated version engaged readers differently. This fall I'll be running a full scale version of that experiment; I adjusted it based on qualitative research I conducted in undergrad English classrooms last spring.
Click here for a brief poster proposal about the experiment project
RideNow: Ad Hoc Ride Sharing and Flexible System Design
Research in the RideNow project focuses on how to motivate participation and reduce coordination costs in ad hoc ride sharing services, as well as the scalability, extensibility, and privacy implications of different system architectures. I am especially interested in the effects of ride sharing on social capital and the development of community.
Click here to read our GROUP paper (367KB - PDF)
MessagePlus
In MessagePlus, we examined what, if any, context can help people make sense of messages in email lists. When people look for content in email lists like Usenet, they often begin by searching. Search results return one message without context, and our experiments compared two interfaces for positiong messages within their thread context.
GLRCE
The Great Lakes Regional Center of Excellence in Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases Research is an NIH/NIAID funded center. My colleagues and I provided the communications core for the center - developing intranet-like websites, public websites, and private websites for the Public Health Officials Network. We researched the use of technology and its role in the development and maintenance of collaborations within the center.
Click here for the poster we presented at the annual meeting in 2005. (1.9MB - PDF)