Keynoters

The 2013 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems

(CTS 2013)

May 20-24, 2013

The Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina

San Diego, California, USA

CTS 2013 KEYNOTES

Tuesday Keynote: Study, Learn, Repeat: An Approach to Social Computing

Loren Terveen

The University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Wednesday Keynote: From Renaissance Scholars to Renaissance Communities:

Learning and Education in the 21st Century

Gerhard Fischer

Center for LifeLong Learning and Design (L3D); Department of Computer Science, and Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado- Boulder, CO, USA

Thursday Keynote: Random Acts of Kindness: The Intelligent and Context-Aware Future of

Reciprocal Altruism and Community Collaboration

Victoria Bellotti

Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, and University of California - Santa Cruz, CA, USA

Luncheon Keynote: Synergizing People, Process, and Technology to Motivate

Knowledge Sharing and Social Collaboration

Cindy Pickering

Information Technology Group, Intel Corporation, AZ, USA

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Tuesday Keynote: Study, Learn, Repeat: An Approach to Social Computing

Loren Terveen

The University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

ABSTRACT

At the University of Minnesota’s GroupLens Lab, we conduct research on social computing and crowdsourcing systems. We study human and socio-cultural behavior on systems such as Wikipedia and Twitter, and we also have created and maintain our own online communities, notably MovieLens and Cyclopath. These communities have attracted significant user communities, which let us use them as testbeds to try out and evaluate new algorithms and user interface techniques.

In this talk, I will describe and illustrate our way of doing research. I will identify several general tensions we manage, such as (1) the ease of doing research with publically available data from platforms like Wikipedia and Twitter vs. the limits on the methods we can apply using these data; and (2) the power of doing research with our own online communities vs. the costs and risks of developing and maintaining them. I will describe and discuss several research themes that we have studied across multiple research platforms, notably intelligent task routing. I will illustrate these points by describing specific research case studies on Wikipedia, MovieLens, and Cyclopath.

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Wednesday Keynote: From Renaissance Scholars to Renaissance Communities:

Learning and Education in the 21st Century

Gerhard Fischer

Center for LifeLong Learning and Design (L3D); Department of Computer Science, and Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado- Boulder, CO, USA

ABSTRACT

The understanding, framing, and support of learning, working, communicating, and collaborating is media-dependent: tools, materials, and social arrangements have always been involved in defining and conceptualizing these activities. Historically the emphasis has been to educate and support individual “Renaissance scholars”. In today’s world, most of the significant problems are systemic problems that transcend not only the individual human mind but cannot be addressed by any single specialty discipline. To cope with these problems requires not only “Renaissance Scholars” but “Renaissance Communities” in which stakeholders coming from different disciplines can collaborate.

Our research at the Center for Lifelong Learning & Design (L3D) over the past two decades has been focused on creating a new understanding of learning, new media, and new learning organizations. Our co-evolutionary perspective explores the dialectical relationship between:

• how a deep understanding of learning creates innovative demands and design criteria for future generations of social-technical environments;

• how the unique potential of computational media impacts and transforms learning by transcending "gift-wrapping" and “technology-centered” approaches; and

• how new learning organizations contribute to reconceptualizing and reinventing learning and education in the 21st century.

The conceptual framework is illustrated by specific developments of social-technical environments that we have designed and evaluated including: collaborative, domain-oriented design environments, environments created by mass collaboration, and courses-as-seeds.

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Thursday Keynote: Random Acts of Kindness: The Intelligent and Context-Aware Future of

Reciprocal Altruism and Community Collaboration

Victoria Bellotti

Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, and University of California - Santa Cruz, CA, USA

ABSTRACT

In today’s world of increasing scarcity of resources and economic stagnation, we still see rapid developments in computer science and user experience towards increasingly mobile, intelligent and context-aware computing systems. These innovations represent a new frontier for transformative innovation on a societal level. They hold the promise of breakthroughs in how people can collaborate through dynamically coordinated, efficient and reciprocal service transactions to improve the quality of life for all. I fix your car, you do a neighbor’s taxes, she designs my new kitchen, and so on. Existing organizations, which are already pursuing the goal of leveraging untapped community potential, do exist. These are known as as timebanks and community exchanges and have been around and increasing in number for quite some time, but they have grown only slowly in relation to the need for their services. This is partly due to a lack of adequate resources devoted towards setting up and running them and also to constraints in the design of the systems that they rely on to coordinate the transactions between community participants.

Dr. Bellotti’s presentation highlights the possibilities for today’s researchers and innovators to turbocharge community collaboration by developing the required technologies. She draws upon findings from prior research and from an ongoing collaboration with Professor John M. Carroll of Penn State University. The guiding vision is to develop more intelligent and context-aware systems to support on-the-fly service brokering that will greatly increase the scope and efficiency of acts of reciprocal altruism.

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Luncheon Keynote: Synergizing People, Process, and Technology to Motivate

Knowledge Sharing and Social Collaboration

Cindy Pickering

Information Technology Group, Intel Corporation, AZ, USA

ABSTRACT

Intel® is the world’s largest Semiconductor chip manufacturing company with over 95,000 employees and 164 sites in 63 countries across the globe. Not only does Intel’s IT group keep Intel’s business operations running, it also contributes to Intel’s business transformation via user experience research and architecture path finding for leading edge technologies. This talk will present the user experience research and architecture path finding results that inform solutions to improve collaboration among Intel employees.

IT sees social computing as a strategic way to improve collaboration, foster innovation, and facilitate learning. Our research has identified the best opportunities for using social computing to boost collaboration and productivity across Intel. To keep achieving maximum benefit from its social computing efforts, Intel IT continues to invest in social capabilities and also partners with Intel HR to help address cultural and motivational barriers. Beyond improving personal productivity, we are looking to enable efficiency in Intel’s business divisions for product design, manufacturing, and sales, through the use of cutting-edge social technologies, including social analytics, immersive video/sketching, federated identity and access management, and cross system activity stream aggregation. Our goal is to continue to transform collaboration across Intel into a seamless and unified experience that brings together relevant information, people, and business intelligence to fully support employee and business workflows.