Gary M. Olson

• University of California, Irvine

MODERN WORD PROCESSORS, like Microsoft Word OneDrive, SharePoint, and Google Docs, allow people to work on the same document at the same time. While systems that allow simultaneous writing have been demonstrated in research labs for some time, only relatively recently have such systems been available commercially for widespread use. Google Docs, fo...

Today's commercially available word processors allow people to write collaboratively in the cloud, both in the familiar asynchronous mode and now in synchronous mode as well. This opens up new ways of working together. We examined the data traces of collaborative writing behavior in student teams' use of Google Docs to discover how they are writing...

Emerging as a discipline in the first half of the twentieth century, the information sciences study how people, groups, organizations, and governments create, share, disseminate, manage, search, access, evaluate, and protect information, as well as how different technologies and policies can facilitate and constrain these activities. Given the broa...

Most interdisciplinary research projects involve geographically distributed participants. It is well known that such dispersion presents many challenges. The good news is that there are a wide variety of excellent technologies that can help bridge the distance among participants. However, there continue to be many challenges in how to make such pro...

As network availability becomes ubiquitous, users are leveraging this access to establish their presence in remote locations through the use of commercially available telepresence technologies. With the increasing adoption of systems, new questions are emerging about how these technologies affect user interactions and relationships. Our goal for th...

Collaborative writing is on the increase. In order to write well together, authors often need to be aware of who has done what recently. We offer a new tool, DocuViz, that displays the entire revision history of Google Docs, showing more than the one-step-at-a-time view now shown in revision history and tracking changes in Word. We introduce the to...

Panelists will discuss how collective intelligence can be applied to large-scale problems through collaborative online systems. The features and affordances of several such systems will be described, inviting discussion about how such systems can be better designed by the CSCW community.

Most interdisciplinary research projects involve geographically distributed participants. It is well known that such dispersion presents many challenges. The good news is that there are a wide variety of excellent technologies that can help bridge the distance among participants. However, there continue to be many challenges in how to make such pro...

Examine how the Electronic Health Record (EHR) and its related systems support or inhibit provider collaboration. Health care systems in the US are simultaneously implementing EHRs and transitioning to more collaborative delivery systems; this study examines the interaction between these two changes. This qualitative study of five US EHR implementa...

The article discusses the use of technology in collaborating with distributed teams of an organization to bring out efficiency in their work. There is a lot a manager can do to make distance work work. The manager can select the right people for the team, help them develop common ground, help motivate their working collaboratively, divide up the wo...

The data collection we did in developing the theory of remote scientific collaboration (TORSC) was done primarily through interviews, either in person or over the telephone. In order to expedite future data collection as well as make our findings accessible to current and future collaboratories or collaborations, we have created an on-line survey t...

Effective collaboration happens when the tools needed are available and used appropriately by the collaborators. In this chapter, we first review the kinds of technologies that have been effective in supporting distributed work, with different kinds of work benefiting from different constellations of technologies. Our framework follows closely that...

Download Free Sample Increasingly, teams are working together when they are not in the same location, even though there are many challenges to doing so successfully. Here we review the latest insights into these matters, guided by a framework that we have developed during two decades of research on this topic. This framework organizes a series of f...

The many challenges of distributed communication and the many challenges of intercultural collaboration have been researched and discussed at length in the literature. What is lacking is a combined approach that looks at both issues of distance and diversity in collaboration. We conducted research in a large, multinational technology company to bet...

This paper discusses the interrelationship between e-Science and CSCW in terms of key substantive, methodological and conceptual innovations made in both fields. In so doing, we hope to draw out the existing relationship between CSCW and e-Science research, and to map out some key future challenges where the two areas of research may become more cl...

Middle- and lower-class preschool children were presented a three-choice problem in which the responses were reinforced on either a 100-0-0 or a 75-25-0 schedule with incentives that differed in value. Higher levels of performance occurred for middle- than for lower-class Ss and for Ss receiving continuous reinforcement. Incentive effects were foun...

We report on a qualitative study of the user experience of cloud-based information work. We characterize the information work practices and challenges that exist largely at the different intersections of three constructs - cloud-based services, collaborations, and digital identifiers. We also demonstrate how the misalignment of these three construc...

Collaboration has become a dominant mode of scientific inquiry, and good collaborative processes are important for ensuring scientific quality and productivity. Often the participants in these collaborations are not collocated, yet distance introduces challenges. There remains a need for evaluative tools that can identify potential collaboration pr...

Networks are increasingly subjected to threats that affect the reliability of critical infrastructure including Distributed Denial of Service attacks, scanning worms, and botnets. These threats pose significant challenges to measurement infrastructure due to their global scope, extreme scale, and dynamic behavior. As a result, current techniques do...

This paper reports the results of a study comparing the relative influence of location and shared identity in partially distributed work. Using an experimental task called Shape Factory, groups of eight participants were configured such that in the baseline 'strangers' condition only the location-based faultline was present while in the experimenta...

Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thir...

Global climate change is one of the most challenging problems humanity has ever faced. Fortunately, a new way of solving large, complex problems has become possible in just the last decade or so. Examples like Wikipedia and Linux illustrate how the work of thousands of people can be combined in ways that would have been impossible only a few years...

Group brainstorming is widely adopted as a design method in the domain of software development. However, existing brainstorming literature has consistently proven group brainstorming to be ineffective under the controlled laboratory settings. Yet, electronic brainstorming systems informed by the results of these prior laboratory studies have failed...

Recent advances in networking (e.g., Internet2), communication technologies (e.g. AccessGrid multipoint video, voice over IP), and information sharing (e.g. Webex synchronous conferencing and asynchronous information repository) hold the promise that working at a distance can be as effective as working collocated. But our recent

The Climate CoLab is a system to help thousands of people around the world collectively develop plans for what humans should do about global climate change. This paper shows how the system combines three design elements (model-based planning, on-line debates, and electronic voting) in a synergistic way. The paper also reports early usage experience...

The paper mentions that social media technologies that began as discretionary and playful have the potential to transform national issues including healthcare, the environment, and media literacy. These loftier goals require a closer look at challenges such as privacy and the ethical use of technology.

This paper presents results of an exploratory study which observed Linux novice users performing complex technical tasks using Google's search engine. In this study we observed that information triage is a difficult process for unexperienced users unless well structured information is provided which results in better satisfaction and search effecti...

Previous research on partially distributed teams has revealed a cluster of problems, including difficulty coordinating, 'ingroup' formation among members in different locations, and lower trust in teammates across distance. But these prior studies involved groups of strangers; would pre-existing groups have the same problems? We recruited groups fr...

Groupware, like other forms of information technology, should be designed with the users’ needs and capabilities as the focus. User‐centered system design consists of observation and analysis of users at work, assistance in design from relevant aspects of theory, and iterative testing with users. We illustrate the various stages of this approach wi...

Idea Generation has been a topic of creativity research for centuries. A wealth of creative processes has been devised to overcome difficulties at the perceptual, emotional, and cultural levels. Brainstorming in particular has grown to become synonymous with idea generation. This paper discusses our preliminary study on current conception of brains...

Gary Olson recently moved to UCI from the University of Michigan, where as faculty member and acting dean, he participated in the formation of its influential School of Information, described in this article. I have helped track down historical information on other influential iSchools. We may be witnessing the birth of a new star in the academic f...

It is common practice nowadays to find, assess and explore the Web by groping scattered information presented through many search results. Browsing interfaces and query sug-gestion techniques attempt to guide the user by providing term recommendations and query phrases. In this paper, we introduce the browsing interface of Kolline, a commu-nity sea...

Summary form only given. Collaboratories to support scientific research have been around for at least two decades, and have emerged as an important form of cyberinfrastructure to enable ever more ambitious geographically distributed research projects. A broadened view of what a collaboratory is suggests there are a variety of kinds of functions the...

At the tenth anniversary workshop of the Human-Computer Interaction Consortium the Olsons reflected on the past, present, and future of the role that geographical distance plays in the work of teams (subsequently published as Olson & Olson, 2000). A decade has passed, filled with research and technology development relevant to the issues raised in...

The need to document, manage, transfer, analyze, and preserve digital data is a significant driver of the development of tools and technologies for e-research. This 'data deluge' is the result of new instruments that collect or log massive amounts of data, the output of large-scale computer simulations, the product of experiments that produce vast...

This book examines various aspects of collaboratories, including the possibility of adopting a scientific approach for such efforts. It finds that a specific scientific approach is adopted in initiating collaboration between geographically dispersed scientists. The book considers that a scientific approach is suitable for such efforts as it helps i...

This chapter presents a case study of an international HIV/AIDS research collaboration. It focuses on studying and supporting the communication needs of geographically spread participants of the HIV Pathogenesis Program (HPP). The HPP is a collaborative research effort between South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The chapter als...

The challenges and rewards of scientific collaboration enabled by information and communication technology, from theoretical approaches to in-depth case studies. Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants. Historically, scientif...

This chapter focuses on developing a theory of remote scientific collaboration (TORSC) on the basis of data derived from the Science of Collaboratories project undertaken by the National Science Foundation. The theory includes studies in the sociology of science and investigations of remote scientific collaboration. The chapter reveals that the suc...

The challenges and rewards of scientific collaboration enabled by information and communication technology, from theoretical approaches to in-depth case studies. Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants. Historically, scientif...

The challenges and rewards of scientific collaboration enabled by information and communication technology, from theoretical approaches to in-depth case studies. Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants. Historically, scientif...

The challenges and rewards of scientific collaboration enabled by information and communication technology, from theoretical approaches to in-depth case studies. Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants. Historically, scientif...

The challenges and rewards of scientific collaboration enabled by information and communication technology, from theoretical approaches to in-depth case studies. Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants. Historically, scientif...

The challenges and rewards of scientific collaboration enabled by information and communication technology, from theoretical approaches to in-depth case studies. Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants. Historically, scientif...

IntroductionAn Initial FrameworkPsychology and CSCWFindings About Behavior Changes with these TechnologiesConclusions Pointers to the Past and Future Research in this AreaReferences

The use of embodied agents, defined as visual human-like representations accompanying a computer interface, is becoming prevalent in applications ranging from educational software to advertisements. In the current work, we assimilate previous empirical ...

The use of embodied agents, defined as visual human-like representations accompanying a computer interface, is becoming prevalent in applications ranging from educational software to advertisements. In the current work, we assimilate previous empirical ...

Promoting affiliation between scientists is relatively easy, but creating larger organizational structures is much more difficult, due to traditions of scientific independence, difficulties of sharing implicit knowledge, and formal organizational barriers. The Science of Collaboratories (SOC) project conducted a broad five-year review to take stock...

Collaboratories that support science and engineering have become more and more common. Unfortunately, many of them experience serious difficulties. Those that involve inter-cultural collaboration are especially problematic. We have identified more than 200 such projects, and have formulated a series of working hypotheses about what factors are asso...

The past decade has seen remarkable advances in the availability of tools to support scientific collaboration at a distance. This is especially good news for international collaborations, where in the past constraints on collocation and travel have made such collaborations a major challenge. The emergence of advanced cyberinfrastructure and associa...

I-schools (schools of information, of informatics, of information studies, and of information sciences) have emerged as a new academic home for university programs in HCI. This panel will discuss the significance of i-schools in US universities, related international university-level education movements and trends, the role and possible trajectory...

We summarize the motivation and aims for this workshop on usability research challenges for cyberinfrastructure and tools, and outline workshop preparations and program.

Looking into the---sometimes bad---reality of life offers rich challenges for interaction design. In this Connections column, John Thackara looks into the aspects of fear and discusses its relevance for human-computer interaction.---Manfred Tscheligi

In this paper we outline the Theory of Remote Collaboration (TORC) that codifies our understanding of the major factors that lead to success in multi-institutional collaboration in science and engineering. The theory focuses on both the social interplay among the collaborators and the fit of the technologies to their work. This theory has implicati...

Effective communication and coordination across multiple sites is extremely important for global software development. An experimental simula- tion that mimics an interdependent software divi- sion working across multiple locations was designed to study this phenomenon. Six experi- ments were run, each with participants divided into four or five si...

Technology has made it possible for organizations to construct teams of people who are not in the same location, adopting what one company calls "virtual collocation." Worldwide groups of software developers, financial analysts, automobile designers, consultants, pricing analysts, and researchers are examples of teams that work together from dispar...

This document presents an assessment of the current and expected needs of the ATLAS Collaboration in the development, deployment, usage, and maintenance of collaborative tools to facilitate its internal and external communications, member training, education, and public outreach. It is prepared in response to a request by the ATLAS management to in...

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is a multidisciplinary field in which psychology and other social sciences unite with computer science and related technical fields with the goal of making computing systems that are both useful and usable. It is a blend of applied and basic research, both drawing from psychological research and contributing new ide...

This paper reviews systematic research on collaborative work involving synchronous, or same-time, interactions, which comprise a major challenge for projects in which a distance of 30 metres or more separates participants. It identifies the specific advantages of close proximity, or 'radical co-location', in which participants share a common room o...

In this paper, we describe a collaborative navigation task in CVE. As a work in process, we present a process model of the task and design an experiment to test hypotheses generated by this process model. Using this experimental approach, we investigated the effect of the dimension of egocentric-exocentric perspectives on collaborative navigation p...

The use of collaborative technologies to support geographically distributed scientific research (or collaboratories) is gaining wide acceptance in many parts of the developed world. Such collaboratories hold great promise for international cooperation in critical areas of scientific research, such as HIV/AIDS. We have extensive experience with the...

Physical proximity and appearance guide people to interact with each other in different ways [1,6]. However, in Video-Mediated Communications (VMC), these are distorted in various ways. Monitors and camera zooms make people look close or far, monitors and camera angles can be high or low making people look tall or short, volume can be loud or soft,...

When virtual teams need to establish trust at a distance, it is advantageous for them to use rich media to communicate. We studied the emergence of trust in a social dilemma game in four different communication situations: face-to-face, video, audio, and text chat. All three of the richer conditions were significant improvements over text chat. Vid...

Groupware is software designed to run over a network in support of the activities of a group. These activities can occupy any of several combinations of same or different place and same or different time. Groupware has been designed for all of these combinations. Early groupware tended to focus on one of these cells, but more recently groupware has...

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is thought to be inadequate when one needs to establish trust. If, however, people meet before using CMC, they trust each other, trust being established through touch. Here we show that if participants do not meet beforehand but rather engage in various getting-acquainted activities over a network, trust is muc...

Designing interactive computer systems to be efficient and easy to use is important so that people in our society may realize the potential benefits of computer-based tools .... Although modern cognitive psychology contains a wealth of knowledge of human ...

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is thought to be inadequate when one needs to establish trust. Rocco [4] found, for example, that discussions about agreements conducted over email were far less successful in engendering trust than those conducted face-to-face. But, if the participants met and did a team building exercise before the real task,...

We studied the emergence of trust in a social dilemma game in four different communication situations: face-to-face, video, audio, and text chat. Three-person groups did 30 rounds of a social dilemma game and we measured trust by the extent to which they cooperated vs. competed. The face-to-face groups quickly achieved cooperative behavior, while t...

We studied the emergence of trust in a social dilemma game in four different communication situations: face-to-face, video, audio, and text chat. Three-person groups did 30 rounds of a social dilemma game and we measured trust by the extent to which they cooperated vs. competed. The face-to-face groups quickly achieved cooperative behavior, while t...

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is thought to be inadequate when one needs to establish trust. Rocco [4] found, for example, that discussions about agreements conducted over email were far less successful in engendering trust than those conducted face-to-face. But, if the participants met and did a team building exercise before the real task,...

The depth of participants' trust and trustworthiness depends on how the medium transmits and translates the social experience, including its often unviewable cultural and personal cues.

Giant strides in information technology at the turn of the century may have unleashed unreachable goals. With the invention of groupware, people expect to communicate easily with each other and accomplish difficult work even though they are remotely located or rarely overlap in time. Major corporations launch global teams, expecting that technology...

More and more organizations are forming teams that are notco-located. These teams communicate via email, fax, telephone andaudio conferences, and sometimes video. The question often ariseswhether the cost of video is worth it. Previous research has shownthat video makes people more satisfied with the work, but it doesnthelp the quality of the work...

An interest in the design of interfaces has been a core topic for researchers and practitioners in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI); an interest in the design of experiments has not. To the extent that reliable and valid guidance for the ...

Having followed a path from the outside in the University of Michigan‘s School of Information, the authors have a broad vision of the school‘s intellectual agenda and the relevance of different conceptual and methodological approaches. As they write in this article, they find it enormously attractive that the school is populated by students and fac...

Several new ways of working together that take advantage of emerging digital technologies are reviewed. These technologies relax the constraints of time and distance on how we can work together. This in turn affects who can participate and what kinds of information can be used. New organizational forms such as collabo-ratories and digital libraries...

Upper atmospheric physics focuses on the study of the earth’s ionosphere, looking particularly at the interactions of the solar wind, the earth’s magnetic field, and the characteristics of the upper atmosphere. Observations of these phenomena are made with ground-based instruments, satellites, and rockets. In recent years, a series of computational...

Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) is the name of the research area that studies the use of computing and communication technologies to support group and organizational activity. CSCW as a field has emerged more recently than human-computer interaction and therefore, in many ways, is less mature. The field of CSCW has mostly been at the sta...

The School of Information at the University of Michigan is a new graduate school that offers highly interdisciplinary opportunities in education and research. We have a program in HCI as well as Library and Information Sciences, Archives and Record Management, and are discussing offerings in Future Systems Architecture, Organizational Information S...

This study assesses whether remotely located pairs of people working on a collaborative task benefit from using video, looking in particular at people for whom communication is stressed. In this study, we extend the research on video-mediated communication to the domain of non-native speaker interactions. Thirty-six pairs performed a map task using...