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Computer-Supported Collaborations In Practice: Two Case Studies of Collaborative Editing and Human-AI Collaboration

Computer-Supported Collaborations In Practice: Two Case Studies of Collaborative Editing and Human-AI Collaboration

Speaker: Dakuo Wang – Cambridge, MA, United States
Topic(s): Human Computer Interaction

Abstract

Collaboration is an essential activity in all kinds of work, and it is not easy. That is why Human Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers from both academia (e.g., CMU, Stanford, UMichigan, and UCI) and industry (e.g., PARC, MSR, and IBM Research) have spent decades of efforts in designing computer systems to support it. Many of these yesterday’s research systems (e.g., Email, video-conferencing, and word-processors) have come out of laboratories and become today’s commercial products in the real world. Though some researchers believe that successful commercialization marks the end of the research work for researchers, I believe it is far from the end. In order to further improve the design of these technologies, researchers should shift their research efforts to focus more on exploring users’ experiences in the wild, and that exhibits new opportunities as well as challenges. In this talk, I will first report on the research project that studies how people write together using today’s commercially available technologies. I use this research project as an example to illustrate how to explore real-world collaborations with new research methods (e.g., information visualization) and data sets (e.g., key-stroke level log data) today.

Besides studying today’s computer-supported collaborations in the wild, I am also interested in studying near future’s collaborations. Given the recent advance of Artificial Intelligent (AI) techniques, particularly in the intelligent conversational agent (CA) domain, my colleagues and I at IBM Research started to investigate how to design CAs to support future collaborations. We envision that there is a possible future that humans and agents will collaborate with each other to accomplish tasks. In the second part of this talk, I will present some preliminary work that we have done at IBM Research in designing and developing CAs that aims to work together with humans in future’s collaborations.

About this Lecture

Number of Slides: 50
Duration: 45 minutes
Languages Available: Chinese (Simplified), English
Last Updated:

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