Date:
Wednesday, October 5, 2005   4:15 - 5:15p

Location:
301 College Avenue, Seminar Room

Abstract:
Collaborative physical tasks are tasks in which two or more individuals jointly perform actions on concrete objects in the three-dimensional world. For example, an expert might guide a worker's performance of emergency aircraft repairs in a remote location or an emergency room team may join forces to save a patient's life. Collaborative physical tasks require substantial coordination among participants’ actions and talk. In face-to-face settings, much of this coordination is managed through visual information. Visual information plays at least two inter-related roles. First, it helps people maintain situation awareness of the state of the task and environment. Second, it helps people communicate, by aiding conversational grounding, or the development of mutual understanding between collaborators.

Different visual cues, such as a partner’s face or task objects, vary in their importance for awareness and conversational grounding. In order to build successful technologies for remote collaboration on physical tasks, we must understand when and how people use different types of visual information to coordinate their activities. We take a decompositional approach to this problem, in which we strive to specify the different types of visual cues available to collaborators in face-to-face and computer-mediated settings and identify how these cues influence situation awareness, communication, and task performance. I will first describe the basic components of this model. Then, I will present a series of behavioral studies examining people’s use of visual information in different media. I will conclude by highlighting the implications of our findings for the design of video systems for remote collaboration on physical tasks and describing our current work developing intelligent video systems that show the right visual information at the right time.

Bio:
Susan R. Fussell is a Research Scientist in the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She earned her PHD in social and cognitive psychology from Columbia University in 1990. In her earlier work, she examined how people take one another’s perspective in face-to-face conversation. Her current research projects include designing multimodal systems for remote collaboration, developing tools to support coordination in hospital settings, understanding the effects of culture on computer-mediated communication, and evaluating the benefits and costs of participating in online support chatrooms.

[handout]

If you would like to meet with Susan, or for more information, please contact Jeff Hancock.