Speaker: Sadat Shami, PhD Student, Information Science, Cornell University

Date: Wednesday, March 30, 2005 4:15-5:15p

Location: 301 College Avenue, Seminar Room

In a special series, the next two IS Seminars will feature Information Science’s first class of graduate students, Jofish Kaye, Gilly Leshed, Lori Lorigo, and Sadat Shami. They will be presenting their recent research on a wide variety of Information Science topics, from the notion of context in knowledge networks to issues of anonymity, affect and collaboration in online communication. Each student will present their work for 20 minutes and take questions for 10 minutes.

This will be an excellent opportunity to see current work by our graduate students. Please make every effort to attend.

Abstract -

Advances in information and communication technologies, increased globalization providing access to skilled labor at lower costs, and the advantage of leveraging the skills of the best individuals for the task are some of the factors driving organizations to form teams comprising individuals located in geographically distant locations. While the benefits of such distributed teams are clear, identifying effective ways of working in these teams is still somewhat of a mystery. One group process that is susceptible in distributed teams is information sharing for effective decision making. In distributed teams, different members possess different levels of information, and successfully accomplishing the task depends on effectively pooling members' unique contributions. Hidden profile tasks, where the complete set of information required to complete the task is partially distributed among group members, can be used to study how distributed teams arrive at decisions. In this talk, I will describe the setup of a study and related hypotheses concerning a) information distribution, and b) member distribution using a hidden profile experiment.

Bio -

N. Sadat Shami's research interests are in the social dynamics of distributed work teams and the design of technological tools needed to support such teams. He has conducted both experiments and field studies of distributed teams. Most recently he was a researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies, IBM Toronto Software Lab, where he studied distributed software development teams. Previously, he was a Research Associate at the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work (CREW) at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor working with Professors Judy Olson, Gary Olson, and Nathan Bos. At CREW, he developed two versions of an organizational simulation called 'Shape Factory'. The simulation is used to examine the behavioral effects of distance on collaboration patterns among workers that utilize computer mediated communication technologies.

For more information please contact Jeff Hancock.