announcement / hci / talk / ubicomp

Announcement: Orit Shaer talk on March 30, 2017

Designing multi-device environments to enhance collaborative decision making

Orit Shaer

12:30 PM, Thursday, March 30, 2016
Location: IOL Training Room
Please register.

Abstract. Large multitouch displays are becoming increasingly available, offering the promise of enhancing colocated collaboration by enabling multiple users to manipulate information using natural interactions such as touch and gestures. Combining a number of multi-touch displays, large and small, facilitates the development of interactive spaces where users can move freely across tasks and working styles.

However, the availability of these exciting devices is not enough to design effective collaborative environments. We also need a deep understanding of how different design characteristics of the environment affect users’ ability to collaborate. To date, little work has examined co-located collaboration in multi-device environments that involve large-scale displays. We are leveraging infrastructure at Wellesley College, consisting of a large-scale interactive tabletop surface and data wall to investigate co-located collaboration in medium-size teams of 8, working on decision-making tasks. To gain deep understanding of individual and group behaviors while using the collaborative environment, we augment traditional measures such as completion time, performance, user satisfaction, and NASA TLX with new computational methods for objective real-time measurements that combine input from multiple eye trackers with logging of user actions.

Bio. Orit Shaer is the Class of 1966 Associate Professor of Computer Science and co-director of the Media Arts and Sciences Program at Wellesley College. She found and directs the Wellesley College Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab. Her research focuses on next generation user interfaces including virtual and augmented reality, tangible, gestural, tactile, and multi touch interaction. Current projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and by industry grants include the design and evaluation of smart environments for collaborative decision-making, the design and evaluation of novel interactive visualizations for personal genomics, the development of computational tools for enhancing learning and innovation in bio-design, and the conceptualization and prototyping of interactive STEM exhibits for discovery museums. Shaer received her PhD and MSc in Computer Science from Tufts University. She has been a research fellow in the Design Machine Group at the University of Washington and in the University College London Interaction Center.

Dr Shaer is a recipient of several NSF and industry awards including the prestigious NSF CAREER Award, Agilent Technologies Research Award, and Google App Engine Education Award. At Wellesley she was awarded the Pinanski Prize for Excellent Teaching. Dr Shaer has served on dozens of program committees, editorial boards, and review panels, including NSF division of Computers in Science and Engineering, ACM CHI, CSCW, UIST, and TEI conferences, and the editorial board of Foundations and Trends in Human Computer Interaction. She currently serves as co-Program Chair for ACM TEI 2017. She chaired the ACM conference on Interactive Surfaces and Tabletops (2012).