Context-Aware Computing for Collaborative Applications

We are currently working on building context-aware applications that adapt their behavior in response to changes in the local user's state. In addition to constructing a context- sensing application for learning and disseminating the user's state, we are also building a suite of applications that react to this information in intelligent and appropriate manners. We are interested in tackling both the context-sensing problem, and how to build intelligent applications around that information.

Talk About Things: Understanding World-Situated Language Use

This project explores how various attributes of shared visual information influence world-situated language use. We develop computational models to describe the ways in which individuals integrate shared visual information with linguistic information when generating partner-specific speech, develop systems to dynamically provide elements of shared visual information at the appropriate times during conversation, and study how individuals adapt their language processes depending on the form of visual information available and the nature of a shared task.

Social and Contextual Factors in Mobile Computing

In earlier work with colleagues at CMU, we performed studies investigating the situational aspects surrounding interruptions and cell phone use. Our recent work examines how a variety of contextual factors can influence mobile device use, and how various social and contextual factors adopt to the particulars of a mobile computing situation.

Modeling Multimodal Interaction

In an era where increasingly complex technologies such as multimodal displays, gesture-based interfaces, and natural language dialogue are being rapidly introduced, our work explores how to maximize the utility of these technologies without disrupting the basic mechanisms that support everyday communication and interaction.

Video Mediated Communication

We are currently exploring the influence of video-mediated communication on the various social and emotional mechanisms underlying small group interaction. This work involves exploration of such topics as trust development in distributed collaboration environments, the development of short term and long-term rapport in video-mediated communication environments, and attribution errors that result from technological constraints on interaction.

Interaction around Collocated and Large-Scale Displays

Together with colleagues at Microsoft Research, we have been exploring performance issues surrounding the use of large scale displays (e.g., wall-size projection displays). Our earlier work examined the role large scale displays play in supporting individual performance on spatial orientation tasks, path-integration tasks, and 3D navigation tasks. Recently, we have begun to explore issues concerning the influence of large scale displays on small group collocated interactions.

Together with Fernanda Viegas and Martin Watternberg in the Visual Communication Lab at IBM T.J. Watson Research, we are exploring the influence of visualizations of collaborative interactions on online impression management.