Much emphasis has been placed on how the affordances and layouts of an office setting can influence co-worker interactions and perceived team outcomes. Little is known, however, whether perceptions of teamwork and team conflict are affected when the location of work changes from the office to the home. To address this gap, we present findings from a ten-week,in situ study of 91 information workers from 27 US-based teams. We compare three distinct work locations---private and shared workspaces at home as well at the office---and explore how each location may impact individual perceptions of teamwork. While there was no significant association with participants' perceptions of teamwork, results revealed associations of work location with team conflict: participants who worked in a private room at home reported significantly lower team conflict compared to those working in the office. No difference was found for the office and the shared workspace. We further found that the influence of work location on team conflict interacted with job decision latitude and the level of task interdependence among co-workers. We discuss practical implications for full-time work from home (WFH) on teams. Our study adds an important environmental dimension to the literature on remote teaming, which in turn may help organizations as they consider, prepare, or implement more permanent WFH and/or hybrid work policies in the future.

Working remotely from home during the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in significant shifts and disruptions in the personal and work lives of millions of information workers and their teams. We examined how sleep patterns---an important component of mental and physical health---relates to teamwork. We used wearable sensing and daily questionnaires to examine sleep patterns, affect, and perceptions of teamwork in 71 information workers from 22 teams over a ten-week period. Participants reported delays in sleep onset and offset as well as longer sleep duration during the pandemic. A similar shift was found in work schedules, though total work hours did not change significantly. Surprisingly, we found that more sleep was negatively related to positive affect, perceptions of teamwork, and perceptions of team productivity. However, a greater misalignment in the sleep patterns of members in a team predicted positive affect and teamwork after accounting for individual differences in sleep preferences. A follow-up analysis of exit interviews with participants revealed team-working conventions and collaborative mindsets as prominent themes that might help explain some of the ways that misalignment in sleep can affect teamwork. We discuss implications of sleep and sleep misalignment in work-from-home contexts with an eye towards leveraging sleep data to facilitate remote teamwork.

Given the widespread adverse outcomes of stress – exacerbated by the current pandemic – wearable sensing provides unique opportunities for automated stress tracking to inform well-being interventions. However, its success in the wild and at scale depends on the robustness and validity of automated stress inference, which is limited in current systems. In this work, we enumerate the properties of robustness and validity necessary for achieving viable automated stress inference using wearable sensors, and we underscore present challenges to constructing and evaluating these systems. Using these criteria as guiding principles, we present automated stress inference results from a large (N=606)in situlongitudinal wearable and contextual sensing study of information workers. Using a multimodal approach encompassing a wearable sensor, relative location tracking, smartphone usage, and environmental sensing, we trained regression models to predict daily self-reported perceived stress in a participant-independent fashion. Our models significantly outperformed baseline variants with shuffled stress scores and were consistent with small-to-moderate effects. Our findings highlight the performance disparity between robust and valid approaches to automated perceived stress inference and current approaches and suggest that further performance gains might require additional sensing modalities and enhanced contextual awareness than existing approaches.

Social media platforms continue to evolve as archival platforms, where important milestones in an individual’s life are socially disclosed for support, solidarity, maintaining and gaining social capital, or to meet therapeutic needs. However, a limited understanding of how and what life events are disclosed (or not) prevents designing platforms to be sensitive to life events. We ask what life events individuals disclose on a 256 participants’ year-long Facebook dataset of 14K posts against their self-reported life events. We contribute a codebook to identify life event disclosures and build regression models on factors explaining life events’ disclosures. Positive and anticipated events are more likely, whereas significant, recent, and intimate events are less likely to be disclosed on social media. While all life events may not be disclosed, online disclosures can reflect complementary information to self-reports. Our work bears practical and platform design implications in providing support and sensitivity to life events.

In the past few years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have drastically increased in popularity both from consumer and industry perspectives. A key component towards enabling the widespread usage of UAVs is the ability to stay in near-constant communication with the drone for command and control and conveying relevant instrumentation. The usage of cellular technology, namely LTE, seems to be a natural fit for addressing coverage and Line of Sight (LoS) issues. However, there is a relative dearth of data, specifically open source data that explores key performance aspects of cellular at altitudes typically envisioned for commercial UAV operation. The key contribution of this paper is to analyze data taken from numerous drone flights that include varying altitudes, locations, and multiple cellular carriers as recorded in a medium-sized Midwestern city. Further, we offer our data as an open-source repository for the community offering multiple vantage points for the various runs including the operating system, chipset (through MobileInsight), drone instrumentation, and server-side packet captures as part of the recorded data streams.

Human abnormal physical and psychological behaviors, such as high level of stress, may result in negative impacts on work and life, if not handled efficiently. However, the continuous collection of behavioral data from questionnaires is not feasible, as is often the case for the natural downside of survey data gathering. Thanks to the proliferation of mobile sensors, it brings compelling opportunities for us to more deeply analyze human behavior. In this work, we ask the question of detecting anomalies in human physical and psychological behaviors from multivariate temporal data from multi-modal sensors. In the past decades, many efforts have been made in developing anomaly detection methods, but there remain several challenges in this specific domain problem: 1) data contains missing values at random positions. 2) data from multiple sensors is of multi-resolution and multivariate. 3) human behaviors are correlated to each other, thus it poses a multi-label problem. 4) the available labeled instances are limited, which requires the semi-supervised learning setting. 5) the frequency of anomaly occurrence is much smaller than that of normal instances, leading to imbalance problems. We propose a novel framework MBead to resolve these concerns. MBead consists of three key components: reweighted autoencoder to capture the dependency across temporal domain and multiple modalities, relevance learning module to learn the pairwise relations among labeled instances, and temporal prediction module to detect the anomalies while trained in semi-supervised settings. Extensive experiments show our MBead outperforms seven state-of-art baselines on three tasks of behavior anomaly detection: stress, affect, and work performance.

Missing data points is a common problem associated with data collected from wearables. This problem is particularly compounded if different subjects have different aspects of missingness associated with them – that is varying degrees of compliance behavior of individuals (participants) with respect to wearables as well as personal changes in lifestyle and health impacting heart rate. Moreover, despite the varying degree of compliance behavior, the wearable in itself might have glitches that lead to observations being dropped. Thus, any missing value imputation in such data has to not only generalize to the wearable behavior but also to the participant behavior. In this paper, we present a deep learning based approach for imputing missing values in heart rate time series data collected from a participant's wearable. In particular, for each participant, we first leverage his/her historical heart rate records as a reference set to extract the underlying personalized characteristics, and then impute the missing heart rate values by considering both contextual information of the current observations and the user's features learned from previous records. Adversarial training is applied to guide the learning process, which imputed more reasonable heart rate series with the consideration of human health conditions, e.g., heart rate fluctuations. Extensive experiments are conducted on two real-world data to show the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art baselines.

The ubiquitous use of social media enables researchers to obtain self-recorded longitudinal data of individuals in real-time. Because this data can be collected in an inexpensive and unobtrusive way at scale, social media has been adopted as a “passive sensor” to study human behavior. However, such research is impacted by the lack of homogeneity in the use of social media, and the engineering challenges in obtaining such data. This paper proposes a statistical framework to leverage the potential of social media in sensing studies of human behavior, while navigating the challenges associated with its sparsity. Our framework is situated in a large-scale in-situ study concerning the passive assessment of psychological constructs of 757 information workers wherein of four sensing streams was deployed - bluetooth beacons, wearable, smartphone, and social media. Our framework includes principled feature transformation and machine learning models that predict latent social media features from the other passive sensors. We demonstrate the efficacy of this imputation framework via a high correlation of 0.78 between actual and imputed social media features. With the imputed features we test and validate predictions on psychological constructs like personality traits and affect. We find that adding the social media data streams, in their imputed form, improves the prediction of these measures. We discuss how our framework can be valuable in multimodal sensing studies that aim to gather comprehensive signals about an individual's state or situation.