Current Projects:

Gestures Project

In face-to-face settings, people use pointing and other gestures to communicate quickly and efficiently with their conversational partners. The aims of this project are, first, to understand how people use gesture to coordinate their talk and actions in collaborative physical (3D) tasks, and second, to develop and test systems to allow remote collaborators to gesture within a shared visual space.

Shared Visual Spaces

Being in the same place improves collaborative work. The primary goals of our research are to understand how a shared visual spaces influences collaboration, to discover how the usefulness of visual information interacts with tasks, and to identify ways to build communication systems for remote collaborative work.

Multidisciplinary Collaboration

This project uses social science methods to better understand the requirements for successful multidisciplinary collaborations, the fundamental processes associated with geographic and functional distance, and applications that could reduce geographic and functional distance and improve conditions for successful multidisciplinary collaborations.

Communication and social interaction in a long term chat community
Susan R. Fussell

This project seeks to develop alternative methods for assessing chatroom participants’ mental and physical well-being, based on the content and structure of their discourse over a period of time, within an established online community. Our goal is to provide a tool that can be used for the assessment of a wide range of mental and physical disorders within various communication technologies. The resulting coding system will then be made freely available in the interest of supporting and improving upon online communities as a resource for those suffering from mental or physical ailments. I performed preliminary analysis of discourse related to this study for a class project, and will continue involvement in the collection and analysis of this data.