While the prevalence of hybrid meetings brought tremendous economic and social benefits, it is important to identify and address the unique challenges of cross-space interactions between in-person and remote attendees. We conducted 30 observations and 25 in-depth interviews to investigate cross-space interactions. We found that in-person and remote attendees were able to transcend the segmented space and spontaneously interact, especially when the technology was set up properly; however, remote participants sometimes had to fight for the conversational floor. We found that interactions were sometimes affected by where the conversational power resided. The medium that has more attendees holds the power of speaking and influences behaviors of attendees joining from the other medium. We contribute to the literature by providing new insights that are specific to the context when hybrid meetings are more large scale.

Many English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students have begun to use generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools to improve their writing artifacts. This introduces both new opportunities and challenges in how they develop, express, and perceive themselves as writers. Drawing on 30 semi-structured interviews with ESL students with experience using generative AI tools in their English writing, this study explores how they incorporate these tools into their writing process, and how doing so reshapes their self-perceptions as writers. Our findings reveal that ESL students strategically use generative AI tools not only to improve the correctness of their language but also to navigate rhetorical and cultural nuances in English writing across different levels. With the language barrier alleviated, they reflected critically on what the use of generative AI means for their writing motivation, personal expression, and skill development as writers. Yet, they found themselves often caught in between conflicting rules and social norms regarding generative AI usage, which creates a ''non-win'' situation where ESL students face potential judgment regardless of their generative AI usage choices. Drawing on these findings, we conclude by offering recommendations for educators to help ESL students engage with writing critically and confidently, and to support their continuous development as AI-assisted writers.

Previous studies of face-to-face (f2f) communication have suggested that speakers rely heavily on a variety of multi-modal cues to make real-time predictions about upcoming words in rapid turn-taking. To understand how computer-mediated communication (CMC) differs from f2f communication in terms of the prediction mechanism, this study assessed how the loss of multi-modal cues would affect word predictability in turn-taking. Participants watched videos, listened to audio, or read a transcript of f2f conversations. Across these three conditions, they predicted the same set of omitted words with different levels of predictability and semantic relatedness to other words in the context. Results showed that words of higher predictability were more accurately predicted regardless of CMC types. Higher response accuracy but longer response time were observed in conditions with richer cues, and for participants with more positive and less negative self-emotions. Meanwhile, semantic relatedness did not affect predictability. These results confirmed the key role of prediction in language processing and conversation smoothness, especially its importance in CMC.

Celebrities have used their imitated voices in media content for various purposes to entertain audiences. However, it is unclear how their fans perceive media content using synthetic celebrity voices. Fans are dedicated to celebrities and actively communicate with them on social media, sometimes resulting in the establishment of parasocial relationships. Focusing on simulated voice messages that mimic celebrities' communication behaviors, we explored how fans form parasocial relationships through synthetic media content. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 fans who used AI Private Call, an AI-based voice message service that employed K-Pop idols' synthetic voices. Findings show that the nature of synthetic voices could not provide impressive experiences related to their idols. However, participants believe that simulated voice messages can help make up for the limited opportunities to interact directly with idols. Based on the theoretical framework of parasocial relationship development, participants engaged with simulated voice messages, exhibiting various cognitive and behavioral actions that dynamically advanced the relationship. These behaviors include aligning voice content with idols' vocal characteristics, adhering to social norms in interactions, and confirming idols' involvement in content creation to demonstrate a sense of authenticity. Additionally, their communities associated with fandoms affect their experiences throughout the process. Based on the findings, we discuss how simulated voices might impact the relationship between fans and celebrities, highlighting the responsibility of communities and platforms. We also propose design guidelines for creating simulated celebrity voice content that fans can entertain.

Misinformation on private messaging platforms like WhatsApp and LINE is a global concern. However, research has primarily focused on combating misinformation on public social media. Misinformation in private messaging platforms is difficult to challenge due to social norms, interpersonal relationships, and technological affordances. This study investigates Auntie Meiyu, a fact-checking chatbot integrated into LINE, a popular private messaging service in Taiwan. We interviewed 27 users who adopted Auntie Meiyu in their messaging groups to understand their motivations and perceptions of the chatbot, and to assess its influence on interpersonal interactions. Participants indicated that they primarily adopted the chatbot to protect close family members from misleading news. Nevertheless, they experienced mixed feelings due to the chatbot's robotic style and errors in detecting misinformation. We conclude that conversational agents present a promising approach for tackling misinformation, particularly when conversational participants disagree, and offer design recommendations for leveraging AI-enabled conversational agents in countering misinformation.

Non-native speakers (NNS) often face challenges gaining the speaking floor in conversations with native speakers (NS) of a common language. To help NNS to contribute more, we developed a conversational agent that opens up the speaking floor either automatically, after NS have taken a certain number of consecutive speaking turns, or manually, upon NNS request. We compared these automatic and manual agents to a control condition in a laboratory study in which one NNS collaborated with two NS using English as a common language. Participants (N=48) communicated over video conferencing from separate locations in a research institution to collaborate on three survival tasks. Based on data gathered from the experiments, the automatic agent encouraged NNS to participate more, which previous studies had attempted but failed to achieve. Excerpts from group discussions further showed the crucial role of the automatic agent on NNS participation. Interview results suggested that while NNS appreciated the automatic agent's help to participation, NS perceived the agent's interruption as unfair because they thought all members were speaking equally, which was not the case. The mismatch in their perceptions further emphasizes the need to intervene, and we provide design implications based on the results.

The COVID-19 pandemic greatly changed many people's daily lives. Because of the temporary closure of gyms and fitness centers, many people started to take group fitness classes online. The abrupt transition to synchronous online exercise brought lots of uncertainty and challenges to fitness instructors and participants. This study aims to understand how people teach and participate in live stream group fitness classes, the challenges they have encountered, and their practices to address these challenges. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 instructors and 14 participants who had experience teaching or taking live stream group fitness classes on Zoom during the pandemic. Our interviews showed that instructors saw teaching online as a new, more cognitively demanding experience than teaching in-person classes; they found limited resources to create a professional workout space, experienced stress and anxiety, had limited information and approaches to give participants feedback, and faced difficulties with rapport building. Participants found it hard to give real-time reactions while exercising far away from their laptops; they receive less customized instructions, and they have difficulty engaging in private chats. Despite the challenges, we envision CMC in exercise is an opportunity for new design and interactions. We propose design recommendations, including using smartwatches to give real-time reactions and smart garments to generate tactile feedback. Health and biometric data can be shared with instructors and other participants during exercise for safety purposes and to create social connections.

Communication tools such as email facilitate communication and collaboration between speakers of different languages, who use two primary strategies-English as a common language and machine translation (MT) tools-to help them overcome language barriers. However, each of these communication strategies creates its own challenges for cross-lingual communication. In this paper, we compare how people's interpretations of an email sender's social intention, and their evaluation of the email and the senders, differ when using a common language versus MT in email communication. We conducted an online experiment in which monolingual native English speakers read and rated request emails written by native English speakers, emails written by bilingual Chinese speakers in English, and emails written in Chinese then machine-translated into English. We found that participants interpreted the social intentions of the email sender less accurately for machine-translated emails than for emails written by non-native speakers in English. Participants also rated the senders and emails less positively overall for machine-translated emails compared to emails written by non-native speakers in English. Based on these findings, we suggest design possibilities that could better aid multilingual communication.

Multiparty collaboration using a common language is often challenging for nonnative speakers (NNS). Conversation can move forward rapidly, with terms and references unfamiliar to NNS often going unexplained because NNS do not request clarification due to cognitive overload or face concerns. Language difficulties may further lead to NNS having a low level of participation in a conversation, which could be a loss for multilingual teams. To help NNS resolve potential confusions due to unfamiliar language use without risking face concerns, we created a conversation agent that asked clarification questions intended to help NNS follow and participate in multiparty conversations. We conducted a within-subjects laboratory experiment with 17 triads of 2 NS and 1 NNS, who performed a series of collaborative tasks under three conditions: a) no agent, b) a high-level agent that resembles a NNS with good command of English, and c) a low-level agent that resembles a NNS with poor English skills. Results suggest that NS made significantly more clarifications in both agent conditions than without an agent. In the high-level agent condition, NNS reported an increase in understanding after the agent's interruption and spoke significantly more. Further, NNS evaluated their communication competence in English highest in the low-level agent condition and lowest in the control condition. Our findings suggest several directions to improve the tool to better facilitate multilingual multiparty communication.

This paper investigates the dissemination, situated fact-checking processes, and social effects of COVID-19 related online and offline misinformation in rural Bangladeshi life. A six-month-long ethnographic study in three villages found villagers perceived a lack of knowledge and experience among local medical professionals and often fell for flashy promotions of unreliable and unconfirmed cures. Villagers built on their local beliefs and myths, religious faiths, and social justice sensibilities while fact-checking suspicious information. They often reported being misled by misinformation that caters to these values, and they further spread this information through conversations with friends and family. Based on our findings, we argue that CSCW and HCI researchers should study misinformation and situated fact-checking together as a communal practice to design appropriate wellbeing technologies and social media for given communities.

Aided by technology, people are increasingly able to communicate across geographical, cultural, and language barriers.This ability also results in new challenges, as interlocutors need to adapt their communication approaches to increasingly diverse circumstances.In this work, we take the first steps towards automatically assisting people in adjusting their language to a specific communication circumstance.As a case study, we focus on facilitating the accurate transmission of pragmatic intentions and introduce a methodology for suggesting paraphrases that achieve the intended level of politeness under a given communication circumstance.We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by evaluating our method in two realistic communication scenarios and show that it can reduce the potential for misalignment between the speaker's intentions and the listener's perceptions in both cases.

Fake news can be disseminated on social media platforms due to users' inability to distinguish it from true news as well as the nature of heuristic-driven online sharing. We use in-depth semi-structured interviews with 20 college student social media users to help build a picture of their sharing processes that can help platform designers and operators better combat fake news dissemination. Participants reflected on specific recently shared news pieces, including how the stories attracted attention, why they shared them, and their behavior after sharing. Interview results revealed different cognitive processes people engaged: before, during and after sharing. Before sharing, participants assessed the news content and evaluated the social value of sharing the particular news piece. During sharing, the audience of the post was selected. After sharing, users examined the feedback from others and revisited previous sharing decisions. The study highlights that decisions about news sharing involve a myriad of different considerations throughout different cognitive stages. Based on these findings, we discuss design implications for combating the sharing of fake news.

Collaborating using a common language can be challenging for non-native speakers (NNS). These challenges can be reduced when native speakers (NS) adjust their speech behavior for NNS, for example by speaking more slowly. In this study, we examined whether the use of real-time speech rate feedback (a speech speedometer) would help NS monitor their speaking speed and adjust for NNS accordingly. We conducted a laboratory experiment with 20 triads of 2 NS and 1 NNS. NS in half of the groups were given the speech speedometer. We found that NS with the speech speedometer were significantly more motivated to slow down their speech but they did not actually speak more slowly, although they made other speech adjustments. Furthermore, NNS perceived the speech of NS with the speedometer less clear, and they felt less accommodated. The results highlight the need for tools that create scaffolding to help NS make speech accommodations. We conclude with some design ideas for these scaffolding tools.

When Instant Messaging (IM) users experience delays in receiving responses from a partner, they may interpret these delays in a variety of ways (e.g., a technological problem vs. the partner is avoiding interaction), and these interpretations can have social consequences. In a laboratory study, we explored whether the presence of a typing indicator shaped people's interpretation of delays. Participants collaborated with a confederate on a time-sensitive task and retrospectively reviewed their interaction. We manipulated delay condition (none, delay, delay with typing indicator) and time pressure (low, high). Participants rated their partners as significantly lower in conversational involvement, were more frustrated, and liked their partners less during a delay whether or not they saw a typing indicator. We discuss implications for the design of new features for IM clients that help people interpret delays appropriately.

The goal of this paper is to investigate how computational tools to annotate communication can support multilingual sense-making on social media. We conducted a field study of SenseTrans, a browser extension that uses sentiment analysis and named entity extraction techniques to annotate Facebook posts with emotional and contextual information. Interviews with 18 participants who used SenseTrans in their Facebook newsfeed for two weeks suggest that the annotations often supported sensemaking by providing additional information they could use to get a quick gist of the posts or to supplement their own interpretations. Participants varied in the extent to which they were motivated to evaluate the credibility of and form mental models of how the annotations were generated, which shaped how they utilized the annotations for sensemaking. Our findings demonstrate the value of designing to support cross-lingual communication and inform design implications for intelligent tools that support communication and sensemaking.

This paper discusses the issues that arise while designing better wellbeing support for a low-income rural population in Bangladesh. Through a four-month long ethnographic study, we explored how people in 13villages in southwestern Bangladesh accessed healthcare. Over the course of our fieldwork, we asked the participants about the existing healthcare services available to them and how they interacted with different ICT-based wellbeing support systems. Our findings show that insufficient resources, schedules, and the distant location of government-supported healthcare facilities were major challenges for the villagers. We also found that villagers' limited knowledge and mistrust of care-providing infrastructure block them from the benefits of available ICT-based supports and resources. Drawing on our findings from the field, we discuss possible alternative design directions for improving wellbeing support for rural Bangladeshis.

Although many social media sites now provide machine translation (MT) for foreign language posts, translation of a post may not suffice to support understanding of, and engagement with, that post. We present SenseTrans, a tool that provides emotional and contextual annotations generated by natural language analysis in addition to machine translation. We evaluated SenseTrans in a laboratory experiment in which native English speakers browsed five Facebook profiles in foreign languages. One group used the SenseTrans interface while the other group used MT alone. Participants using SenseTrans reported significantly greater understanding of the posts, and greater willingness to engage with the posts. However, no additional cognitive load was associated with using an interface that provided more information. These results provide promising support for the idea of using computational tools to annotate communication to support multilingual sense making and interaction on social media.

Telepresence robots provide remote team members with embodied presence, but whether this improves remote teammate participation, remote users' perceptions of team collaboration, or collocated members' perceptions of remote teammates is an open question. We conducted an experiment in which teams of two collocated members and one telepresent (remote) member solved a word puzzle requiring a translation key. We varied who had access to the key to examine effects of resource accessibility in distributed groups: in the Robot Information condition, the remote pilot (RP) possessed the key; in the Shared Information condition, all team members possessed the key; in the Local Information condition, only collocated participants (CPs) possessed the key. Audio transcripts were analyzed for differences in the number of words spoken by each team member. RPs spoke significantly less than CPs, especially when they lacked the translation key. RPs perceived greater task difficulty and less ease of communication than CPs. CPs rated other CPs as more trustworthy than RPs. This suggests an imbalance between collocated and remote collaborators that can negatively affect collaboration. We discuss implications for the design and use of telepresence robots in the workplace.

Multilingual teams often include subgroups of members who share a native language different from the team's common language. Linguistic choices by members of these subgroups can have implications for information exchange at the team level. We reported a field study of language use in 3 multilingual teams, each of which consisted of some native English speakers (NS) and some non-native English speakers (NNS) who shared a native language with at least one other team member. We found that NNS often shifted between English and their native language. The way language shift happened differed for formal meetings, informal conversations, and instant messaging. Language variation was often associated with shifts in content, participants, and communication medium. Further analysis indicated that language shift had both benefits and costs for team communication, depending on the context in which it happened. Based on these findings, we outline suggestions for designing multilingual collaboration systems.

We designed, implemented, and evaluated an iOS mobile application called EnergyHome to investigate how social interaction among housemates is related to their engagement in energy-saving practices. EnergyHome enables housemates to track personal energy-saving activities and to collaborate on saving energy together. Fourteen pairs of housemates used EnergyHome for a week. Afterwards, we interviewed each participant about their use of the app. All interviews were transcribed and analyzed using an iterative comparative approach. We identified two types of social dynamics in the way housemates used the app. In complementary dynamics, one housemate took the initiative to set energy-saving challenges and the other(s) followed. In symmetrical dynamics, housemates collectively set energy-saving challenges but no one tried to exert control. Based on these findings, we discuss design strategies to motivate energy conservation that take into account different social dynamics among housemates.

When people communicate, their messages convey affect alongside informational content. The affective dimension of messages is often unclear and open to multiple interpretations especially in an intercultural context. Thus, interlocutors may or may not achieve a state of affective grounding in which each person's affective behaviors are correctly interpreted by his/her partners. The current study examines the effects of culture on affective grounding. We conducted a laboratory experiment in which pairs of participants, half from America (A) and half from China (C), collaborated over instant messaging (IM). We found that affective grounding was harder to achieve for AA and AC pairs, but easier for CC pairs. We propose several design solutions to facilitate affective grounding in remote collaborations.

Previous research has shown that communication technologies may make it challenging for working professionals to manage the boundaries between their work life and home life. For college students, however, there is a less clear definition of what constitutes work and what constitutes home life. As a result, students may use different boundary management strategies than working professionals. To explore this issue, we interviewed 29 undergraduates about how they managed boundaries between different areas of their life. Interviewees reported maintaining flexible and permeable boundaries that are not bounded physically or temporally. They used both technological and non-technological strategies to manage different life spheres. Interviewees saw technology as a major source of boundary violations but also as a boundary managing strategy that allowed them to achieve better life balance. Based on these findings, we propose design implications for tools to better support the boundary management processes of undergraduate students.

Many people's social media feeds include posts in languages they do not understand. While previous research has examined bilingual social media users' language choices, little research has focused on how people make sense of foreign language posts. In the present study, we interviewed 23 undergraduate social media users about how they consume and make sense of posts in other languages. Interviewees reported that they often did not pay attention to or engage with foreign language posts, due to a lack of relevance and contextual knowledge. When they did actively engage with foreign language posts, interviewees did not rely solely on machine translation output but instead actively collected and combined various cues from within and outside the post in order to understand what it was about. Interviewees further reported different types of goals for trying to make sense of foreign language posts; some focused on simply extracting and understanding the emotional components of a post while others tried to gain a fuller understanding of a post, including its contextual and cultural meanings. Based on these findings, we suggest design possibilities that could better aid multilingual communication in social media.

Collaborative sensemaking requires that analysts share their information and insights with each other, but this process of sharing runs the risks of prematurely focusing the investigation on specific suspects. To address this tension, we propose and test an interface for collaborative crime analysis that aims to make analysts more aware of their sensemaking processes. We compare our sensemaking translucence interface to a standard interface without special sensemaking features in a controlled laboratory study. We found that the sensemaking translucence interface significantly improved clue finding and crime solving performance, but that analysts rated the interface lower on subjective measures than the standard interface. We conclude that designing for distributed sensemaking requires balancing task performance vs. user experience and real-time information sharing vs. data accuracy.

Conversational grounding, or establishing mutual knowledge that messages have been understood as intended, can be difficult to achieve when some conversational participants are using a non-native language. These difficulties in grounding can be challenging for native speakers to detect. In this paper, we examine the value of signaling potential grounding problems to native speakers (NS) by displaying how non-native speakers (NNS) use automated transcripts and bilingual dictionaries. We conducted a laboratory experiment in which NS and NNS of English collaborated via audio conferencing on a map navigation task. Triads of one NS guider, one NS follower, and one NNS follower performed the task using one of three awareness displays: (a) a no awareness display that showed only the automated transcripts, (b) a general awareness display that showed whether each follower was reading the automated transcripts and/or translating a word; or (c) a detailed awareness display that showed which line of the transcripts a follower was reading and/or which words he/she was translating. NS guiders and NNS followers collaborated most successfully with the detailed awareness display, while NS guiders and NS followers performed equally across conditions. Our findings suggest several ways to improve systems to support multilingual collaboration.

Machine translation (MT) creates both opportunities and challenges for multilingual collaboration: While MT enables collaborators to communicate via their native languages, it can introduce errors that make communication difficult. In the current paper, we examine whether displaying two alternative translations for each message will improve conversational grounding and task performance. We conducted a laboratory experiment in which monolingual native English speakers collaborated with bilingual native Mandarin speakers on a map navigation task. Each dyad performed the task in one of three communication conditions: MT with single output, MT with two outputs, and English as a common language. Dyads given two translations for each message communicated more efficiently, and performed better on the task, than dyads given one translation. Our findings show the value of providing multiple translations in multilingual collaboration, and suggest design features of future MT-based collaboration tools.

Real-time transcripts generated by automated speech recognition (ASR) technologies have the potential to facilitate communication between native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS). Previous studies of ASR have focused on how transcripts aid NNS speech comprehension. In this study, we examine whether transcripts benefit multiparty real-time conversation between NS and NNS. We hypothesized that ASR transcripts would be more beneficial when the transcripts were publicly shared by all group members as opposed to when they were seen only by the NNS. To test our hypothesis, we conducted a lab experiment in which 14 groups of native and non-native speakers engaged in a story-telling task. Half of the groups received private transcripts that were available only to the NNS; the other half received publicly shared transcripts that were available to all group members. NS spoke more clearly, and both NS and NNS rated the quality of communication higher, when transcripts were publicly shared. These findings inform the design of future tools to support multilingual group communication.

When crime analysts collaborate to solve crime cases, they need to share insights in order to connect the clues, identify a pattern, and attribute the crime to the right culprit. We designed a collaborative analysis tool to explore the value of implicitly sharing insights and notes, without requiring analysts to explicitly push information or request it from each other. In an experiment, pairs of remote individuals played the role of crime analysts solving a set of serial killer crimes with both partners having some, but not all, relevant clues. When implicit sharing of notes was available, participants remembered more clues related to detecting the serial killer, and they perceived the tool as more useful compared to when implicit sharing was not available.

We propose to improve real-time communication between people who do not share a common language by foregrounding potential problems in machine translation. We developed a prototype chat tool that displays two parallel translations of each chat turn, with the thought that comparing the translations might both highlight problems and provide resources for resolving them. We conducted a user study to investigate how people use and like such an interface compared to a standard one-translation interface. On balance, users preferred two translations to one, using them to both notice differences and infer meaning from uncertain translations, with no increase in workload. This suggests that this interface may help improve cross-lingual communication in practical applications and lays the groundwork for a larger design space around systems that highlight possible errors to support communication.

Traditional communication tools tend to make their presence known, e.g., "when my collaborators and I are using IM to discuss our work, how could we not realize the actual presence of IM?" In the case of machine translation (MT) mediated collaborations, however, the absence or presence of MT is not obvious. English sentences with poor grammar can result from both a partner's lack of fluency and errors in the MT process. We hypothesize that partners' attributions about the source of the errors affects their collaboration experience. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a laboratory experiment in which monolingual native English speaking participants collaborated with bilingual native-Mandarin speakers on a map navigation task. Participants were randomly assigned into a 2 (beliefs about MT: absence vs. presence) by 2 (actual mediation of MT: absence vs. presence) experiment design. Beliefs about presence of MT significantly impacted the collaboration experience, opening new opportunities for both research and design around MT-mediated collaborations.

In the U.S., hotels are a heavy energy-consuming sector. Yet they sometimes prioritize customer satisfaction over lower energy use. In this study, we discuss how mobile designs can help to motivate energy-saving behaviors while maintaining users' satisfaction. We conducted a diary study of 13 participants and an interview study of 20 participants to understand user experiences around energy consumption in hotel and motel rooms. We found that people unnecessarily consume energy because they are unfamiliar with the hotel room environment and they want to be catered to by the hotel. We suggest two mobile design ideas: location-based energy conservation, and blending lights, and discuss the opportunities of mobile designs to balance personal controls and automation to support user experience and satisfaction yet decrease energy use in hospitality settings.

Machine translation (MT) has the potential to allow members of multilingual organizations to interact via their own native languages, but issues with the quality of MT output have made it difficult to realize this potential. We hypothesized that highlighting keywords in MT output might make it easier for people to overlook translation errors and focus on what was intended by the message. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a laboratory experiment in which native English speakers interacted with a Mandarin-speaking confederate using machine translation. Participants performed three brainstorming tasks, under each of three conditions: no highlighting, keyword highlighting, and random highlighting. Our results indicated that people consider the identical messages clearer and less distracting when the keywords in the message are highlighted. Keyword highlighting also improved subjective impressions of the partner and the quality of the collaboration. These findings inform the design of future communication tools to support multilingual communications.

Many sophisticated tools have been developed to help analysts detect patterns in large datasets, but the value of these tools' individual features is rarely tested. In an experiment in which participants played detectives solving homicides, we tested the utility of a visualization of data links and a notepad for collecting and organizing annotations. The visualization significantly improved participants' ability to solve the crime whereas the notepad did not. Having both features available provided no benefit over having just the visualization. The results raise questions about the potential constraints on the usefulness of intelligence analysis tools.

In this paper we explore how and why communication problems such as lack of understanding, low involvement, and negative emotions emerged during the computer-mediated conversations of same-culture and cross-culture pairs. We used retrospective analysis, in which pairs of cross-culture and same-culture American and Chinese participants collaborated on a crime-solving task via Instant Messaging (IM), and later reviewed their IM conversations to report their thoughts and feelings on a minute-by-minute basis. We found differences in the types of messages people produced based on the cultural combination of the pairs. We also found that the content of their partner's messages influenced participants' involvement and negative emotions during the conversation. Our results provide insights into the conversational processes of computer-mediated intercultural teams, and have implications for the design of intercultural collaboration tools.

Diversity among members of international teams can be a valuable source of novel ideas. However, to reap these benefits, groups need to overcome communication barriers that stem from differences in members' native languages. We compare two strategies for overcoming these barriers: the use of English as a common language, and the use of machine translation (MT) tools that allow each person to communicate in his or her own native language. Dyads consisting of one English-speaking American and one native Mandarin-speaking Chinese participant exchanged ideas to perform brainstorming tasks, either through English or using MT. We found that MT helped the non-native English speakers produce ideas but that both native and non-native English speakers viewed MT-mediated messages as less comprehensible than English messages. The findings suggest it can be effective to support cross-lingual communication with asymmetric design, using MT technology to help people produce messages in their native languages, while leaving incoming messages untranslated and leveraging people's second language proficiency for comprehension.

Informal communication in organizations has many benefits, but people who are not native speakers of the organization's common language may find it hard to interact informally. In an interview study of nine native English-speaking and 33 non-native English-speaking students at a large U.S. university, we explore how native language shapes patterns of informal interaction. We found that non-native speakers generally preferred interacting informally with fellow speakers of their own native language as opposed to native English speakers, which hinders communication and collaboration between groups. Three factors led to this "clustering" effect: issues of common ground, feelings of social obligation to other speakers of one's native language, and desires to build social networks within a language group. Four factors led to greater motivation for cross-language interaction: a desire to build bridging capital, physical proximity, one-on-one or small-group interaction, and an established work relationship. The findings suggest ways that communication tools might reduce barriers to informal interaction between speakers of different native languages.

When pairs work together on a physical task, seeing a common workspace facilitates communication and benefits performance. When mediating such activities, however, the choice of technology can transform the visual information in ways that impact critical coordination processes. In this article we examine two coordination processes that are impacted by visual information—situation awareness and conversational grounding—which are theoretically distinct but often confounded in empirical research. We present three empirical studies that demonstrate how shared visual information supports collaboration through these two distinct routes. We also address how particular features of visual information interact with features of the task to influence situation awareness and conversational grounding, and further demonstrate how these features affect conversation and coordination. Experiment 1 manipulates the immediacy of the visual information and shows that immediate visual feedback facilitates collaboration by impro...

Informal interactions are a key element of group work, and many theoretical frameworks and systems have been developed to understand and support these conversations in distributed workgroups. In particular, systems used in several recent experiments provided information about others' current activities so that their availability for conversation could be assessed, and interruptions could be timed strategically. One issue with these experimental systems, though, is that many do not notify the observed party that these observations are taking place. There is reason to believe that such notification could be valuable to users, and that it could alter observers' behavior. Moreover, factors such as the perceived urgency of the interruption could affect willingness to violate social norms in gathering information. We report on an experiment assessing the impact of perceived visibility and task urgency on awareness checking behavior. Results suggest that people check more often when they believe their partners do not know they are checking, and more often when the task is time-constrained than when it is not.

Research has shown that intercultural communication can be more problematic than same-culture communication. In this study we use a technique called retrospective analysis in order to examine these problems in greater detail. American and Chinese participants discussed a crime story with either an American or a Chinese partner using Instant Messaging (IM). After the session, each participant reviewed the IM conversation in two-minute segments and rated it on several dimensions. Chinese participants reported significantly more problems than American participants, and partner culture affected all participants' feelings of annoyance. An analysis of the communication problems participants reported showed four themes: mismatched communication styles, differences in conversational focus, relationship-building issues, and problems with the IM medium. The results show how differences in communication styles can affect intercultural conversations and provide design suggestions for new tools to improve intercultural collaboration.

In this paper we describe two studies intended to replicate earlier work comparing American and Chinese communication in a negotiation task using several different media. In the earlier studies, the participants all spoke in English, raising the question of whether differences in fluency rather than differences in cultural background explained the results. We replicated the earlier studies using materials translated into Chinese, a native Chinese-speaking experimenter, and native Chinese participants. Counts of Chinese characters in each media show nearly the identical pattern found in the earlier studies, suggesting that cultural differences in communication styles, rather than fluency, account for the earlier findings. We describe implications of this work for tools to support intercultural communication.

Group brainstorming, or collaboratively generating ideas through idea sharing, demands diverse contributions to spark more ideas and improve creativity. One approach to supporting group brainstorming is to introduce conceptual diversity. In this study, we evaluate the effects of two sources of diversity on group brainstorming: cultural differences internal to multicultural groups and pictures related to the conversation retrieved by a computer agent. The pictures generally enhanced performance as measured by both originality and diversity of ideas. The pictures also helped to convert cultural diversity into a creative outcome, the diversity of ideas generated. We argue that with appropriate technology mediation, cultural diversity may be used strategically to enhance task outcomes.

To accommodate frequent emergencies, interruptions, and delays, hospital staff continually make and coordinate changes to the surgery schedule. The technical and social aspects of coordination in surgical suites have been described by prior studies. This paper addresses an understudied aspect of coordination: the physical environment. Based on a field study of four surgical suites in two large academic centers, we show how the physical layout of hallways and rooms, and barriers and spaces around displays and key coordinators, support or fail to support the common information spaces used for coordination. We use the concept "information hotspots" to represent how physical places and their characteristics facilitate coordination. We developed design principles based on the concept of information hotspots that should guide architectural considerations for coordination in dynamic environments such as hospitals.

In a world of widespread information access, information can overwhelm collaborators, even with visualizations to help. We extend prior work to study the effect of shared information on collaboration. We analyzed the success and discussion process of remote pairs trying to identify a serial killer in multiple crime cases. Each partner had half of the evidence, or each partner had all the available evidence. Pairs also used one of three tools: spreadsheet only (control condition), unshared visualizations, or shared visualization. Visualizations improved analysis over the control condition but this improvement depended on how much evidence each partner had. When each partner possessed all the evidence with visualizations, discussion flagged and pairs showed evidence of more confirmation bias. They discussed fewer hypotheses and persisted on the wrong hypothesis. We discuss the possible reasons for this phenomenon and implications for design of remote collaboration systems to incorporate awareness of intermediate processes important to collaborative success.

In recent years, a growing number of studies examining how culture shapes computer-mediated communication (CMC) have appeared in the CHI and CSCW literature. Findings from these studies reveal that cultural differences exist, but no clear underlying explanation can account for results across studies. We describe several limitations of the theoretical frameworks used to motivate many of the prior studies over the past decade, most notably the assumption that tasks and media used in these studies are perceived similarly by participants from different cultural backgrounds. We then describe an interview study in which we asked 22 participants from America, Korea, India and China about their perceptions of media and motivations for media choices in different hypothetical settings. The results suggest cultural differences in how media are perceived, specifically, that the ability for media to support social in addition to task processes is more important for participants from China, Korea and India than for participants from the U.S. We conclude with some recommendations for enhancing CMC theories to account for cultural differences.

Creativity is central to much human problem solving and innovation. Brainstorming processes attempt to leverage group creativity, but group dynamics sometimes limit their utility. We present IdeaExpander, a tool to support group brainstorming by intelligently selecting pictorial stimuli based on the group's conversation The design is based on theories of how perception, thinking, and communication interact; a pilot study (N=16) suggests that it increases individuals' idea production and that people value it.

Online collaboration, in comparison to face-to-face collaboration, is advantageous in making multiparty teamwork possible at a very low cost. As multicultural multiparty collaboration becomes ubiquitous, it is crucial to understand how communication processes are shaped in the social and media environments that computer-mediated communication affords. We conducted a laboratory study investigating how different types of cultural asymmetry in group composition (Chinese of the majority versus American of the majority) and communication media (text-only versus video-enabled chatroom) influence conversational similarity between Chinese and Americans. The paper presents an analysis identifying that the selection of media and the cultural composition of the group jointly shape intercultural conversational closeness.

Supporting creativity via collaborative group brainstorming is a prevalent practice in organizations. Today's technology makes it easy for international and intercultural group members to brainstorm together remotely, but surprisingly little is known about how culture and medium shape the underlying brainstorming process. In a laboratory study, we examined the influences of individual cultural background (American versus Chinese), group cultural composition (same- versus mixed-culture groups), and communication medium (text-only versus video-enabled chatrooms) on group brainstorming conversations. Cultural differences and adaptation in conversational talkativeness and responsiveness were identified. The text-only medium reduced cultural differences in talkativeness. Working in a mixed-culture group led to cultural adaptation in the communication style of Chinese but not American participants. We discuss implications for international group brainstorming.

Personal energy consumption, specifically home energy consumption such as heating, cooling, and electricity, has been an important environmental and economic topic for decades. Despite the attention paid to this area, few researchers have specifically explored these issues within a community that makes up approximately 30% of U.S. households -- those below the federal poverty line. We present a study of 26 low-income households in two very different locations -- a small town in the Southern U.S. and a northerly metropolitan area. Through a photo-elicitation study and directed interviews, we explore the relationship between energy saving behaviors, external factors, and users' intrinsic values and beliefs. Most of our participants are committed to saving energy for non-financial reasons, even when not responsible for paying bills. Challenges to saving energy include safety and lack of control over the environment. We discuss how Ubicomp technologies for saving energy can address some of these challenges.

Information visualizations can improve collaborative problem solving, but this improvement may depend on whether visualizations promote communication. In an experiment on the effect of network visualizations, remote pairs worked synchronously to identify a serial killer. They discussed disparate evidence distributed across the pair using IM. Four conditions, respectively, offered (a) spreadsheet only (controls), (b) individual unshared visualizations, (c) view-only shared visualizations, and (d) a full-access shared visualization of all evidence. We examined collaborative performance, use of the visualization tool, and communication as a function of condition. All visualization conditions improved remote collaborators' performance over the control condition. Full access to a shared visualization best facilitated remote collaboration by encouraging tool use and fostering discussion between the partners. Shared visualization without full access impaired performance somewhat and made communication even more vital to identifying the serial killer. This study provides direct evidence of visualization tool features and partner behavior that promote collaboration.

Responsiveness, or the time until a person responds to communication, can affect the dynamics of a conversation as well as participants' perceptions of one another. In this paper, we present a careful examination of responsiveness to instant messaging communication, showing, for example, that work-fragmentation significantly correlates with faster responsiveness. We show also that the presentation of the incoming communication significantly affects responsiveness (even more so than indicators that the communication was ongoing), suggesting the potential for dynamically influencing responsiveness. This work contributes to a better understanding of computer-mediated communication and to the design of new tools for computer-mediated communication.

Computer-mediated collaboration is becoming an increasingly prevalent form of work ([22]). At the same time, organizations are relying more and more on culturally diverse teams to staff knowledge-intensive projects (e.g., software development, customer service, corporate training,). We conducted a laboratory study examining the role of collaborative technologies and culture on 2-person team members' attributions of causes for their collaborative performance. Pairs of American, Chinese, and intercultural American-Chinese students collaborated on two map navigation tasks using one of three technologies: video, audio, or IM. As predicted, culture and technology interacted to affect the extent to which members attributed performance to dispositional factors (e.g., personality or mood) vs. situational factors (e.g., the technology or task difficulty). We discuss the implications of our results for

We explored anthropomorphism in people's reactions to a robot in social context vs. their more considered judgments of robots in the abstract. Participants saw a photo and read transcripts from a health interview by a robot or human interviewer. For half of the participants, the interviewer was polite and for the other half, the interviewer was impolite. Participants then summarized the interactions in their own words and responded true or false to adjectives describing the interviewer. They later completed a post-task survey about whether a robot interviewer would possess moods, attitudes, and feelings. The results showed substantial anthropomorphism in participants' interview summaries and true-false responses, but minimal anthropomorphism in the abstract robot survey. Those who interacted with the robot interviewer tended to anthropomorphize more in the post-task survey, suggesting that as people interact more with robots, their abstract conceptions of them will become more anthropomorphic.

While shared visual space plays a very important role in remote collaboration on physical tasks, it is challenging and expensive to track users' focus of attention (FOA) during these tasks. In this paper, we propose to identify a user's FOA from his/her intention based on task properties, people's actions in the workspace, and conversational content. We employ a conditional Markov model to characterize a subject's FOA. We demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method using a collaborative laboratory task in which one partner (the helper) instructs another (the worker) on how to assemble online puzzles. We model a helper's FOA using task properties, workers' actions, and conversational content. The accuracy of the model ranged from 65.40% for puzzles with easy-to-name pieces to 74.25% for puzzles with more difficult-to-name pieces. The proposed model can be used to predicate a user's FOA in a remote collaborative task without tracking the user's eye gaze.

Expertise to assist people on complex tasks is often in short supply. One solution to this problem is to design systems that allow remote experts to help multiple people in simultaneously. As a first step towards building such a system, we studied experts' attention and communication as they assisted two novices at the same time in a co-located setting. We compared simultaneous instruction when the novices are being instructed to do the same task or different tasks. Using machine learning, we attempted to identify speech markers of upcoming attention shifts that could serve as input to a remote assistance system.

HRI researchers interested in social robots have made large investments in humanoid robots. There is still sparse evidence that peoples' responses to robots differ from their responses to computer agents, suggesting that agent studies might serve to test HRI hypotheses. To help us understand the difference between people's social interactions with an agent and a robot, we experimentally compared people's responses in a health interview with (a) a computer agent projected either on a computer monitor or life-size on a screen, (b) a remote robot projected life-size on a screen, or (c) a collocated robot in the same room. We found a few behavioral and large attitude differences across these conditions. Participants forgot more and disclosed least with the collocated robot, next with the projected remote robot, and then with the agent. They spent more time with the collocated robot and their attitudes were most positive toward that robot. We discuss tradeoffs for HRI research of using collocated robots, remote robots, and computer agents as proxies of robots.

When a robot provides direction--as a guide, an assistant, or as an instructor--the robot may have to interact with people of different backgrounds and skill sets. Different people require informat on adapted to their level of understanding. In this paper, we explore the use of two simple forms of awareness that a robot might use to infer that a person needs further verbal elaboration during a tool select on task. First, the robot could use an eye tracker for inferring whether the person is looking at the robot and thus in need of further elaboration. Second, the robot could monitor delays in the individual's task progress, indicating that he or she could use further elaboration. We investigated the effects of these two types of awareness on performance time, selection mistakes, and the number of questions people asked the robot. We did not observe any obvious benefits of our gaze awareness manipulation. Awareness of task delays did reduce the number of questions participants' asked compared to our control condition but did not significantly reduce the number of select on mistakes. The mixed results of our investigation suggest that more research is necessary before we can understand how awareness of gaze and awareness of task delay can be successfully implemented in human-robot dialogue.

When pairs work together on a physical task, seeing a common workspace benefits their performance and transforms their use of language. Previous results have demonstrated that visual information helps collaborative pairs to understand the current state of their task, ground their conversations, and communicate efficiently. However, collaborative technologies often impinge on the visual information needed to support successful collaboration. One example of this is the introduction of delayed visual feedback in a collaborative environment. We present results from two studies that detail the form of the function that describes the relationship between visual delay and collaborative task performance. The first study precisely demonstrates how a range of visual delays differentially impact performance and the collaborative strategies employed. The second study describes how parameters of the task, such as the dynamics of the visual environment, reduce the amount of delay that can be tolerated.

We propose a method of measuring people's sense of presence in computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems) based on linguistic features of their dialogues. We create variations in presence by asking participants to collaborate on physical tasks in four CMC conditions. We then correlate self-reported feelings of presence with the use of specific linguistic features. Regression analyses show that 30% of the variance in self-reported presence can be accounted for by a small number of task-independent linguistic features. Even better prediction can be obtained when self-reported coordination is added to the regression equation. We conclude that linguistic measures of presence have value for studies of CMC.

Information technologies have the potential to facilitate cross-cultural collaboration, but this potential may be limited by different styles of IT use in different cultures. We report the results of a preliminary study and a larger follow-up study that focus on the use of Instant Messaging (IM) in North America and Asia. Consistent with the distinction between Western individualistic, low-context cultures and Eastern collectivistic, high-context cultures, we found that multi-party chat, audio-video chat and emoticons were much more popular in Asia than in North America. We conclude that cultural differences should be taken into consideration when designing tools for cross-cultural communication.

Human-robot interaction could be improved by designing robots that engage in adaptive dialogue with users. An adaptive robot could estimate the information needs of individuals and change its dialogue to suit these needs. We test the value of adaptive robot dialogue by experimentally comparing the effects of adaptation versus no adaptation on information exchange and social relations. In Experiment 1, a robot chef adapted to novices by providing detailed explanations of cooking tools; doing so improved information exchange for novice participants but did not influence experts. Experiment 2 added incentives for speed and accuracy and replicated the results from Experiment 1 with respect to information exchange. When the robot's dialogue was adapted for expert knowledge (names of tools rather than explanations), expert participants found the robot to be more effective, more authoritative, and less patronizing. This work suggests adaptation in human-robot interaction has consequences for both task performance and social cohesion. It also suggests that people may be more sensitive to social relations with robots when under task or time pressure.

The increasing interest in supporting multiparty remote collaboration has created both opportunities and challenges for the research community. The research reported here aims to develop tools to support multiparty remote collaborations and to study human behaviors using these tools. In this paper we first introduce an experimental multimedia (video and audio) system with which an expert can collaborate with several novices. We then use this system to study helpers' focus of attention (FOA) during a collaborative circuit assembly task. We investigate the relationship between FOA and language as well as activities using multimodal (audio and video) data, and use learning methods to predict helpers' FOA. We process different modalities separately and fusion the results to make a final decision. We employ a sliding window-based delayed labeling method to automatically predict changes in FOA in real time using only the dialogue among the helper and workers. We apply an adaptive background subtraction method and support vector machine to recognize the worker's activities from the video. To predict the helper's FOA, we make decisions using the information of joint project boundaries and workers' recent activities. The overall prediction accuracies are 79.52% using audio only and 81.79% using audio and video combined.

Email consumes significant time and attention in the workplace. We conducted an organizational survey to understand how and why people attend to incoming email messages. We examined people's ratings of message importance and the actions they took on specific email messages, based on message characteristics and characteristics of receivers and senders. Respondents kept half of their new messages in the inbox and replied to about a third of them. They rated messages as important if they were about work and required action. Importance, in turn, had a modest impact on whether people replied to their incoming messages and whether they saved them. The results indicate that factors other than message importance (e.g., their social nature) also determine how people handle email. Overall, email usage reflects attentional differences due both to personal propensities and to work demands and relationships.

Helpers providing guidance for collaborative physical tasks shift their gaze between the workspace, supply area, and instructions. Understanding when and why helpers gaze at each area is important both for a theoretical understanding of collaboration on physical tasks and for the design of automated video systems for remote collaboration. In a laboratory experiment using a collaborative puzzle task, we recorded helpers' gaze while manipulating task complexity and piece differentiability. Helpers gazed toward the pieces bay more frequently when pieces were difficult to differentiate and less frequently over repeated trials. Preliminary analyses of message content show that helpers tend to look at the pieces bay when describing the next piece and at the workspace when describing where it goes. The results are consistent with a grounding model of communication, in which helpers seek visual evidence of understanding unless they are confident that they have been understood. The results also suggest the feasibility of building automated video systems based on remote helpers' shifting visual requirements.

To overcome the limitations of current technologies for remote collaboration, we propose a system that changes a video feed based on task properties, people’s actions, and message properties. First, we examined how participants manage different visual resources in a laboratory experiment using a collaborative task in which one partner (the helper) instructs another (the worker) how to assemble online puzzles. We analyzed helpers’ eye gaze as a function of the aforementioned parameters. Helpers gazed at the set of alternative pieces more frequently when it was harder for workers to differentiate these pieces, and less frequently over repeated trials. The results further suggest that a helper’s desired focus of attention can be predicted based on task properties, his/her partner’s actions, and message properties. We propose a conditional Markov model classifier to explore the feasibility of predicting gaze based on these properties. The accuracy of the model ranged from 65.40 % for puzzles with easyto-name pieces to 74.25 % for puzzles with more difficult to name pieces. The results suggest that we can use our model to automatically manipulate video feeds to show what helpers want to see when they want to see it. Categories and Subject Descriptors H5.3. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Group and organizational interfaces – collaborative computing, computer-supported collaborative work

We present a study of the effects of instant messaging (IM) on individuals' management of work across multiple collaborative projects. Groups of four participants completed four web design tasks. Each participant worked on two tasks, each task with a different partner who was either co-located or remote, connected via IM. In one condition, each participant had one co-located and one remote partner. In a second condition, both partners were remote. We examined communication, division of labor, and task performance as a function of condition. The results indicated that nearly all participants divided their time unequally between projects, but less unequally in the remote/remote condition. In the co-located/remote condition, participants favored the task with the co-located partner. The results show that the effects of IM differ depending on people's multiple tasks are distributed across space. We propose a new IM interface that promotes awareness of multiple collaborators on multiple tasks.

How much history of the dialogue should a chat client include? Some chat clients have minimized the dialogue history to deploy the space for other purposes. A theory of conversational coordination suggests that stripping away history raises the cost of conversational grounding, creating problems for both writers and readers. To test this proposition and inform design, we conducted an experiment in which one person instructed another on how to solve a simple puzzle. Participants had chat clients that showed either a single conversational turn or six of them. Having the dialogue history helped collaborators communicate efficiently and led to faster and better task performance. The dialogue history was most useful when the puzzles were more linguistically complex and when instructors could not see the work area. We present evidence of participants adapting their discourse to partially compensate for deficits in the communication media.

A shared visual workspace allows multiple people to see similar views of objects and environments. Prior empirical literature demonstrates that visual information helps collaborators understand the current state of their task and enables them to communicate and ground their conversations efficiently. We present an empirical study that demonstrates how action replaces explicit verbal instruction in a shared visual workspace. Pairs performed a referential communication task with and without a shared visual space. A detailed sequential analysis of the communicative content reveals that pairs with a shared workspace were less likely to explicitly verify their actions with speech. Rather, they relied on visual information to provide the necessary communicative and coordinative cues.

As new communications media foster international collaborations, we would be remiss in overlooking cultural differences when assessing them. In this study, 24 pairs in three cultural groupings--American-American (AA), Chinese-Chinese (CC) and American-Chinese (AC) --worked on two decision-making tasks, one face-to-face and the other via IM. Drawing upon prior research, we predicted differences in conversational efficiency, conversational content, interaction quality, persuasion, and performance. The quantitative results combined with conversation analysis suggest that the groups viewed the task differently--AA pairs as an exercise in situation-specific compromise; CC as consensus-reaching. Cultural differences were reduced but not eliminated in the IM condition.

This article considers tools to support remote gesture in video systems being used to complete collaborative physical tasks-tasks in which two or more individuals work together manipulating three-dimensional objects in the real world. We first discuss the process of conversational grounding during collaborative physical tasks, particularly the role of two types of gestures in the grounding process: pointing gestures, which are used to refer to task objects and locations, and representational gestures, which are used to represent the form of task objects and the nature of actions to be used with those objects. We then consider ways in which both pointing and representational gestures can be instantiated in systems for remote collaboration on physical tasks. We present the results of two studies that use a "surrogate" approach to remote gesture, in which images are intended to express the meaning of gestures through visible embodiments, rather than direct views of the hands. In Study 1, we compare performance with a cursor-based pointing device that allows remote partners to point to objects in a video feed of the work area to performance side-by-side or with the video system alone. In Study 2, we compare performance with two variations of a pen-based drawing tool that allows for both pointing and representational gestures to performance with video alone. The results suggest that simple surrogate gesture tools can be used to convey gestures from remote sites, but that the tools need to be able to convey representational as well as pointing gestures to be effective. The results further suggest that an automatic erasure function, in which drawings disappear a few seconds after they were created, is more beneficial for collaboration than tools requiring manual erasure. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of the results, as well as several areas for future research.

This study assessed the value of two video configurations-a head-mounted camera with eye tracking capability and a scene camera providing a view of the work environment-on remote collaboration on physical (3D) tasks. Pairs of participants performed five robot construction tasks in five media conditions: side-by-side, audio-only, head-mounted camera, scene camera, and scene plus head cameras. Task completion times were shortest in the side-by-side condition, and shorter with the scene camera than in the audio-only condition. Participants rated their work quality highest when side-by-side, intermediate with the scene camera, and worst in the audio-only and head-camera conditions. Similarly, helpers' self-rated ability to assist workers and pairs' communication efficiency were highest in the side-by-side condition, but significantly higher with the scene camera than in the audio-only condition. The results demonstrate the value of a shared view of the work environment for remote collaboration on physical tasks.

We present a system integrating gesture and live video to support collaboration on physical tasks. The architecture combines network IP cameras, desktop PCs, and tablet PCs to allow a remote helper to draw on a video feed of a workspace as he/she provides task instructions. A gesture recognition component enables the system both to normalize freehand drawings to facilitate communication with remote partners and to use pen-based input as a camera control device. Results of a preliminary user study suggest that our gesture over video communication system enhances task performance over traditional video-only systems. Implications for the design of multimodal systems to support collaborative physical tasks are also discussed.

We demonstrate a multimedia system that integrates pen-based gesture and live video to support collaboration on physical tasks. The system combines network IP cameras, desktop PCs, and tablet PCs (or PDAs) to allow a remote helper to draw on a video feed of a workspace as he/she provides task instructions. A gesture recognition component enables the system both to normalize freehand drawings to facilitate communication with remote partners and to use pen-based input as a camera control device. The system also embeds some tools, such as controlled video delay, gesture delay, and remote camera pan-tilt-zoom control. The system provides a software environment for studying multimodal/multimedia communication for remote collaborative physical tasks.

In this article we consider the ways in which visual information is used as a conversational resource in the accomplishment of collaborative physical tasks. We focus on the role of visual information in maintaining task awareness and in achieving mutual understanding in conversation. We first describe the theoretical framework we use to analyze the role of visual information in physical collaboration. Then, we present two experiments that vary the amount and quality of the visual information available to participants during a collaborative bicycle repair task. We examine the effects of this visual information on performance and on conversational strategies. We conclude with a general discussion of how situational awareness and conversational grounding are achieved in collaborative tasks and with some design considerations for systems to support remote collaborative repair.

A shared visual workspace is one where multiple people can see the same objects at roughly the same time. We present findings from an experiment investigating the effects of shared visual space on a collaborative puzzle task. We show that having the shared visual space helps collaborators understand the current state of their task and enables them to communicate and ground their conversations efficiently. These processes are associated with faster and better task performance. Delaying the visual update in the space reduces benefits and degrades performance. The shared visual space is more useful when tasks are visually complex or when actors have no simple vocabulary for describing their world. We find evidence for the ways in which participants adapt their discourse processes to their level of shared visual information.

We outline some of the benefits of shared visual information for collaborative repair tasks and report on a study comparing collaborative performance on a manual task by workers and helpers who are located side-by-side or connected via audio-video or audio-only links. Results show that the dyads complete the task more quickly and accurately when helpers are co-located than when they are connected via an audio link. However, they didn't achieve similar efficiency gains when they communicated through an audio/video link. These results demonstrate the value of a shared visual work space, but raise questions about the adequacy of current video communication technology for implementing it.

The god of this paper is to iden@ the communication tactics that tiow management teams to successtiy coordinate without becoming overloaded, and to see whether successti coordination and fidom from overload independently Muence team pefiormance.We found that how much teams comnumicatti, what they communicated abou~and the technologies they used to communicate prdlcted coordination and overload.Team coordination but not overload prdlcted team SUWSS.