[UCI-Calit2] REMINDER: Tuesday seminar on Multi-Tasking

Stuart Ross stuross at calit2.uci.edu
Mon Aug 1 23:05:47 PDT 2011


Calit2 announces another seminar in the 2011 program for Summer Undergraduate Fellowships in Information Technology (SURF-IT).  The seminar is open to the public.

“Multi-tasking in the Workplace: Tasks, Information, and Interaction Contexts”

Dr. Gloria Mark
Department of Informatics
Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

Tuesday, August 2, 11:45 AM
Room 3008, Calit2 Building
A light lunch will be available at 11:45; the seminar will begin at 12:00

Summary by Dr. Mark:  For the last five years I have been trying to understand the nature of multitasking. In this talk I will present empirical results from fieldwork observations and experiments over the last few years which detail the extent to which information workers multitask, irrespective of their organizational role. I will discuss how multi-tasking impacts collaboration and communication in the workplace. Not only do information workers switch continually among multiple tasks but they also switch continually among interactions in varied workplace contexts, such as the work home and organization. Interruptions are correlated with stress: people compensate for interruptions by working faster, but this comes at a price of experiencing more stress. These results challenge the traditional way that most IT is designed to organize information, i.e. in terms of distinct tasks. Instead, I will discuss how IT should support information organization in a way consistent with how most people were found to organize their work, in terms of much larger thematically connected units of work. I will present technology prototypes designed to support people in their multi-tasking and will also discuss opportunities for new social and technical solutions to support multi-tasking in the workplace.  I will also talk about an ongoing study where we are examining the effects of restricting people from access to digital media. 

Dr. Gloria Mark is a Professor in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine. Dr. Mark received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University. Prior to joining UCI in 2000, she was a Research Scientist at the GMD (German National Research Center for Information Technology), in Bonn, a visiting research scientist at the Boeing Company, and a research scientist at the Electronic Data Systems Center for Advanced Research.  Dr. Mark's research focuses on the design and evaluation of collaborative systems.  Her current projects include studying multi-tasking of information workers, technology use in disrupted environments and virtual telemedicine.   In 2006, she received a Fulbright scholarship to conduct research at the Humboldt University in Berlin.  Dr. Mark has published in numerous national and international conferences and journals.  She was program chair for the 2006 ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), is the program chair for ACM CSCW'12 and is on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction, the CSCW journal and e-commerce Quarterly.   Her work has also appeared in the popular press, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

 

 
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