Keynotes

The 2014 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems

(CTS 2014)

May 19-23, 2014

The Commons Hotel

Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

CTS 2014 KEYNOTES & PLENARIES

Tuesday Keynote: What Makes Distance Work Work?

Judith S. Olson

Department of Informatics

University of California - Irvine, California, USA

NOTES (See file below)

Wednesday Keynote: The Experimentalist's Manifesto: A Challenge for

Social and Collaborative Computing

Joseph A. Konstan

Distinguished McKnight University Professor

University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, Minnesota, USA

NOTES (See file below)

Thursday Keynote: Computing and Design

Mark D. Gross

Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS)

University of Colorado - Boulder, Colorado, USA

NOTES (See file below)

CTS 2014 Plenary: Collaborative Analysis in the Intelligence Community:

Research Opportunities

Rita M. Bush

Incisive Analysis Office

Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)

Office of the Director of National Intelligence, USA

NOTES (See contact Dr. Bush directly)

Luncheon Keynote: Talking in the Zooniverse: A Collaborative Tool

for Citizen Scientists

Lucy Fortson

School of Physics and Astronomy

University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, Minnesota, USA

NOTES (See file below)

CTS 2014 Closing Plenary: Advances And Opportunities For Research On

Open Collaboration Crowdsourcing

Gert-Jan de Vreede

The Center for Collaboration Science

University of Nebraska at Omaha, Nebraska, USA

NOTES (See file below)

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Tuesday Keynote: What Makes Distance Work Work?

Judith S. Olson

Department of Informatics

University of California - Irvine, California, USA

ABSTRACT

Distance work presents a number of special challenges. People are blind to the activities and status of their remote teammates and invisible to them in the same way. Teammates often have to communicate across time zones, making work fall outside the normal day for some, usually the less powerful. Distance work involves people with different institutional expectations and rules, like Institutional Review Boards and handling of intellectual property. And, they sometimes cross country and cultural boundaries, where a host of misunderstandings are likely to occur. Yet, some people are successful in making this kind of work work. In this talk I will outline the technical and social solutions that together reduce the effects of distance. I will close by introducing an online tool, called the Collaboration Success Wizard, which assesses a particular collaboration and gives both individual and collective feedback as well as, importantly, suggesting what to do to make the collaboration less stressful and more likely to be successful.

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Wednesday Keynote: The Experimentalist's Manifesto: A Challenge for

Social and Collaborative Computing

Joseph A. Konstan

Distinguished McKnight University Professor

University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, Minnesota, USA

ABSTRACT

"Big Data" is everywhere. And data about social and collaborative computing keeps getting bigger. This leads to a natural temptation to seek knowledge in that data. This talk is both a warning and an illustration that big data isn't the be all and end all of research. Too often big data holds many answers, only some of which are true. And too often big data leads researchers to easy questions and away from hard ones.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. Qualitative studies can be used to gain insight and develop hypotheses. And formal controlled experiments can answer hard questions -- including the always challenging questions about causality.

The GroupLens Research Group at the University of Minnesota has spent the past 20 years trying to balance data-centered research with experimental research. Drawing on examples from our past work in recommender systems and peer-contribution, and on our current efforts in crowdsourcing and community knowledge building, I will lay out what we've learned about keeping big data analysis, laboratory studies, and field experiments and studies in balance. In the end, The Experimentalist's Manifesto starts with interesting problems and leads to rewarding results.

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Thursday Keynote: Computing and Design

Mark D. Gross

Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS)

University of Colorado - Boulder, Colorado, USA

ABSTRACT

Computing — programming — has long been an attractive creative medium for those who master the art. Advances in computing over the past 30 years bring us to an interesting moment: Now more than ever before, people without formal training can code. But not only that: With relatively simple microcontroller boards novices can build hardware, and embed software into things, and with advances in desktop manufacturing such as 3-D printing people will soon also be able to produce physical embodiments for computationally enhanced objects. We’re seeing computational creativity in unexpected places: for example, among artists, hobbyists, and children; but also among scientists and engineers in fields far from computer science. Our challenge today is to develop and provide tools and techniques to introduce and support a next generation of participants in computing and design. Answering the challenge will embrace new interaction technologies and techniques, programming languages, as well fundamental research on designing.

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CTS 2014 Plenary: Collaborative Analysis in the Intelligence Community:

Research Opportunities

Rita M. Bush

Incisive Analysis Office

Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)

Office of the Director of National Intelligence, USA

ABSTRACT

Collaborative analysis in the Intelligence Community (IC) can be characterized along two dimensions: implicit vs explicit collaboration, and synchronous vs asynchronous collaboration. This talk will provide examples of each in operation in the IC, and will discuss how pilot activities and research in the IC are attempting to change and enhance the nature of collaborative work within and across the 16 agencies that comprise the IC.

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Luncheon Keynote: Talking in the Zooniverse: A Collaborative Tool

for Citizen Scientists

Lucy Fortson

School of Physics and Astronomy

University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, Minnesota, USA

ABSTRACT

Virtual Citizen Science (VCS) is a form of collaborative research involving the general public as volunteers in online reporting or analysis of data. Critical to the success of a VCS is the ability of the volunteers to communicate amongst themselves and with project researchers in dynamically defined communities. These communications facilitate the introduction of inexperienced volunteers to the primary task as well as provide a mechanism for volunteers to collect and discuss interesting objects that they have classified. In this presentation, I will describe the Talk tool, an object-oriented data collection and discussion tool developed by the Zooniverse.org online citizen science platform and report on the use of the Talk tool across multiple Zooniverse projects. I will describe several case studies involving the importance of the Talk tool in generating volunteer-initiated discoveries. I will also report on investigations of the use of Talk during the critical launch phase of Zooniverse projects as a means of communication between the project team and volunteers; and discuss potential implications of these communications in engaging the volunteers and as a key indicator of success for a project.

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CTS 2014 Closing Plenary: Advances And Opportunities For Research On

Open Collaboration Crowdsourcing

Gert-Jan de Vreede

The Center for Collaboration Science

University of Nebraska at Omaha, Nebraska, USA

ABSTRACT

The ubiquity of collaboration technologies allows companies, non-profits, and governmental organizational to engage large numbers of people both within and outside their organizational boundaries. This has given rise to new forms of collaboration: From small group, focused and time-boxed collaboration, to an environment in which unstructured, longitudinal mass collaboration is the norm. Specific examples include the Linux open source community, Wikipedia, or new phenomena such as Open Innovation and Collective Intelligence.

A particularly interesting phenomenon is crowdsourcing. The popularity of crowdsourcing is grounded in the belief that a large group of volunteer amateur individuals can outperform a dedicated small team of dedicated professionals. Recent research has shown that crowdsourcing can be a very productive approach for organizations to (1) farm out large scale information processing tasks that can be split into many discrete and independent sub-activities, (2) to solicit innovative solutions to a problem in a competition style format, and (3) to engage a large group of people in collaborative problem solving discussions.

However, while there is a proliferation of crowdsourcing service providers illustrating the popularity of the phenomenon, many efforts are thwarted because of the common challenge to convince people to participate and seriously work on someone else’s problems. Yet, initiating and sustaining user engagement is but one of the many complex research challenges facing crowdsourcing practitioners and researchers.

This keynote will discuss a number of recent research advances in open collaboration crowdsourcing and outline a program of research to increase the value and utility of this type of crowdsourcing.