Jason B. Ellis

Games for virtual team building

Distributed teams are increasingly common in todays workplace. For these teams, face-to-face meetings where members can most easily build trust are rare and often costprohibitive. 3D virtual worlds and games may provide an alternate means for encouraging team development due to their affordances for facile communication, emotional engagement, and social interaction among participants. Using principles derived from social psychological theory, we have designed and built a collection of team-building games within the popular virtual world Second Life. We detail here the design decisions made in the creation of these games and discuss how they evolved based on early participant observations.

Designing task visualizations to support the coordination of work in software development

Software development tools primarily focus on supporting the technical work. Yet no matter the tools employed, the process followed, or the size of the team, important aspects of development are non-technical, and largely unsupported. For example, increasing distribution of development teams highlights the issues of coordination and cooperation. This paper focuses on one area: managing change requests. Interviews with industry and open-source programmers were used to create designs for the visual inspection of change requests. This paper presents fieldwork findings and two designs. We conclude by reflecting on the issues that task visualizations that support social inferences address in software development.

Publics in practice: ubiquitous computing at a shelter for homeless mothers

Today, commodity technologies like mobile phones - once symbols of status and wealth - have become deeply woven into social and economic participation in Western society. Despite the pervasiveness of these technologies, there remain groups who may not have extensive access to them but who are nonetheless deeply affected by their presence in everyday life. In light of this, we designed, built, and deployed a ubiquitous computing system for one such overlooked group: the staff and residents at a shelter for homeless mothers. Our system connects mobile phones, a shared display, and a Web application to help staff and residents stay connected. We report on the adoption and use of this system over the course of a 30 week deployment, discussing the substantial impact our system had on shelter life and the broader implications for such socio-technical systems that sit at the juncture of social action and organizational coordination.

Acquiring a professional "second life": problems and prospects for the use of virtual worlds in business

The current surge of interest in virtual worlds suggests they are poised to make an evolutionary leap to the workplace, as instant messaging did a decade ago. In recent work we have introduced dozens of new users to teambuilding activities in the Second Life® environment, meeting both enthusiasm and skepticism. We document five issues for professional users of virtual environments: initial motivation, technical difficulties, interacting competently, becoming socially proficient, and finding compelling activities. Based on these we describe a training strategy to enable professional users of virtual worlds.

Mobile phones for health education in the developing world: SMS as a user interface

Uganda suffers from a severe shortage of professional healthcare workers. Thus, programs aimed at prevention of disease are an important complement to the limited healthcare delivery system. We analyze two deployments of an SMS-based HIV/AIDS education system that uses a quiz format to assess peoples knowledge of the disease, including its causes and methods of prevention. The deployments were to two groups in Uganda, one a sample of mobile phone users who live in a town in northwest Uganda; the other, workers at three factories in central and southeastern Uganda. The two samples had accuracy rates above chance levels and workers at the three factories had higher rates of participation (more individuals and more questions) than the sample selected from the cell tower service area. An analysis of incorrect answers suggested that while participants had some difficulty in matching the formatting required by the quiz, literacy did not appear to be a significant problem. We discuss the results in terms of implications for using SMS as a user interface mechanism and explore the possibility of using social ties among participants as a way to promote the scalability and sustainability of this quiz-based education method.

Exploring Big Data with Helix: Finding Needles in a Big Haystack

While much work has focused on efficient processing of Big Data, little work considers how to understand them. In this paper, we describe Helix, a system for guided exploration of Big Data. Helix provides a unified view of sources, ranging from spreadsheets and XML files with no schema, all the way to RDF graphs and relational data with well-defined schemas. Helix users explore these heterogeneous data sources through a combination of keyword searches and navigation of linked web pages that include information about the schemas, as well as data and semantic links within and across sources. At a technical level, the paper describes the research challenges involved in developing Helix, along with a set of real-world usage scenarios and the lessons learned.

Promoting Integrated Social and Medical Care through Semantic Integration and Context Visualization

With many disparate information systems distributed among social and medical care facilities, achieving an integrated social and medical view of people is a huge challenge. We propose a system based on semantic integration that addresses this challenge. It achieves light-weight data integration and navigation via a three-layer architecture: a virtual RDF view layer, a distributed query processing layer and a unified context view layer. This integrates information from disparate systems without cloning data, and also supports data exploration through a novel visualization.

Social visualization in software development

Most software development tools focus on supporting the primary technical work -- writing code, managing requirements, filing bugs, etc. Yet with large teams, managing the social aspects of a project can be as complex as managing code. Here, we discuss the iterative design of a visualization that helps developers better understand the social aspects of their work.