CAREER: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to the Next Generation of Collaborative Technologies

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

This research aims to enable the development of the next generation of collaborative technologies and to study their effects on human collaboration. It does so by improving our theoretical understanding of how various features of shared visual context affect communication, coordination and collaboration. The research develops and makes available the code for a new dual eye tracking methodology that can be used to study coordination and collaboration. It also develops a new set of metrics that can be more generally used to understand coordinated eye movements as they relate to dialogue and conversation. The results of this work will add to knowledge in a number of disciplines, including human-computer interaction, language technologies, computer science, computational linguistics, communication studies, cognitive science, and social and cognitive psychology. As recent efforts in telemedicine, distance education, and remote training and repair attest, there exists enormous potential for technologies to support these activities at a distance, ultimately resulting in widespread benefits such as equal access to quality education and medical care. The education activities in this research include: (1) developing a new Ph.D. course that teaches a theory-driven design approach; (2) developing a series of course modules that use the dual eye tracking methodology to teach behavioral coding, statistics and machine learning; (3) developing a publicly available multimodal corpus with a set of tutorials, and (4) developing a series of international workshops on dual eye tracking. Finally, the research will simultaneously advance discovery and understanding while training both graduate and undergraduate students in interdisciplinary research methods and will contribute to the development of traditionally underrepresented individuals in the fields of computer and information sciences.