CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar   (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design)

Fridays 11:30am-12:30pm PT · Gates B3 · Open to the public
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Gloria Mark
UC Irvine
Understanding the workplace experience through sensor tracking of behavior
April 13, 2018

Understanding the workplace experience is important in order to develop solutions to improve health, mood, and performance, and reduce stress. However, until recently, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral measurements of the workplace experience have been constrained by methodologies based on infrequent measurements or self-reports. The ongoing revolution in the development of sensor technologies is enabling new ways to measure human behavior in situ with precision. With a mixed-methods approach using sensors, EMA, computer logging, and repeated surveys, I have studied the workplace experience, showing for example, how attention focus, stress and affect are impacted by digital media use, and how attention focus varies over the workday. This research shows that there are consequences of having access to so many digital information sources: they compete for people's attention, leading to continual switching of attention among different information streams and devices. I will discuss the value and challenges of multi-faceted quantitative measures of in situ behavior as we move towards designing interdisciplinary research to study and design for digital media use.

Gloria Mark is a Professor in the Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on studying how the use of digital technology impacts our lives in real-world contexts. She received her PhD in Psychology from Columbia University. Prior to UCI she worked at the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD, now Fraunhofer Institute) and has been an ongoing visiting researcher at Microsoft Research since 2012, as well as a visiting researcher at IBM, National University of Singapore, and the MIT Media Lab. She was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy and has been a Fulbright scholar. She was the general co-chair for the ACM CHI 2017 conference, and is on the editorial boards of the ACM TOCHI and Human-Computer Interaction journals. Her work has appeared in the popular press such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, the BBC, NPR, Time, The Wall Street Journal and she has presented her work at SXSW and the Aspen Ideas Festival.