Coordination and Success in Multidisciplinary Scientific Collaborations

The research enterprise increasingly involves multidisciplinary collaboration, sometimes over geographic distance. Technological advances have made these collaborations possible, and the history of past innovations suggests these collaborations are desirable. Yet multidisciplinary projects can carry high coordination costs. This study investigated how collaborations address disciplinary differences and geographic dispersion to coordinate people and tasks to achieve success. We conducted an inductive study of 62 scientific collaborations supported by a program of the U.S. National Science Foundation in 1998 and 1999. Projects with principal investigators in more disciplines did not appear to suffer more coordination losses and reported as many positive outcomes as did projects involving fewer disciplines. By contrast, geographic dispersion, rather than multidisciplinarity, was most problematic. Dispersed projects, with principal investigators from more universities, were significantly less well coordinated and reported fewer positive outcomes than collocated projects. Coordination mechanisms that brought researchers together physically somewhat reduced the negative impact of dispersion. We discuss several implications for theory, practice, and policy

Managing Expertise in a Distributed Environment

Expertise is the primary resource and product of professional service and technical firms. These firms often organize around project teams that advise and work under contract for clients. A key problem for management is to deploy expertise in project teams so as to meet the expertise requirements of projects and clients. Because expertise may be geographically distributed across multiple sites, many of these firms create virtual or distributed teams. Doing so gives these firms access to a larger pool of knowledge resources than would be available at one site and helps leverage expertise across the organization. However, geographically distributed collaboration in teams incurs coordination and other costs that local work does not. Is a distributed team worth these costs? We studied a professional service firm with distributed and collocated project teams. In this firm, domain expertise tended to be concentrated within geographic sites, whereas methodological expertise was distributed across the firm. We examined whether a better match of domain and methodological expertise to the needs of projects resulted in more profitable projects, and whether distributed teams matched these two types of expertise to the requirements of projects as well as or better than did collocated teams. We found that most projects were collocated, with members drawn from one site who had domain expertise that matched project requirements as well as when members were drawn from other sites. The profits of projects were unrelated to the match of domain expertise with project requirements. However, project profits were significantly and positively related to a match of methodological expertise with project requirements. Furthermore, distributed projects showed a stronger match of methodological expertise with project requirements than did collocated projects, and predicted disproportionately more profits. We conclude that an appropriate utilization of organizationally distributed expertise has a positive impact on project performance

Human Mental Models of Humanoid Robots

Effective communication between a person and a robot may depend on whether there exists a common ground of understanding between the two. In two experiments modelled after human-human studies we examined how people form a mental model of a robot’s factual knowledge. Participants estimated the robot’s knowledge by extrapolating from their own knowledge and from information about the robot’s origin and language. These results suggest that designers of humanoid robots must attend not only to the social cues that robots emit but also to the information people use to create mental models of a robot.published_or_final_versio

Predicting human interruptibility with sensors, in

A person seeking someone else’s attention is normally able to quickly assess how interruptible they are. This assessment allows for behavior we perceive as natural, socially appropriate, or simply polite. On the other hand, today’s computer systems are almost entirely oblivious to the human world they operate in, and typically have no way to take into account the interruptibility of the user. This paper presents a Wizard of Oz study exploring whether, and how, robust sensor-based predictions of interruptibility might be constructed, which sensors might be most useful to such predictions, and how simple such sensors might be. The study simulates a range of possible sensors through human coding of audio and video recordings. Experience sampling is used to simultaneously collect randomly distributed self-reports of interruptibility. Based on these simulated sensors, we construct statistical models predicting human interruptibility and compare their predictions with the collected self-report data. The results of these models, although covering a demographically limited sample, are very promising, with the overall accuracy of several models reaching about 78%. Additionally, a model tuned to avoiding unwanted interruptions does so for 90 % of its predictions, while retaining 75 % overall accuracy

Student public commitment in a school-based diabetes prevention project: impact on physical health and health behavior

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>As concern about youth obesity continues to mount, there is increasing consideration of widespread policy changes to support improved nutritional and enhanced physical activity offerings in schools. A critical element in the success of such programs may be to involve students as spokespeople for the program. Making such a public commitment to healthy lifestyle program targets (improved nutrition and enhanced physical activity) may potentiate healthy behavior changes among such students and provide a model for their peers. This paper examines whether student's "public commitment"--voluntary participation as a peer communicator or in student-generated media opportunities--in a school-based intervention to prevent diabetes and reduce obesity predicted improved study outcomes including reduced obesity and improved health behaviors.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Secondary analysis of data from a 3-year randomized controlled trial conducted in 42 middle schools examining the impact of a multi-component school-based program on body mass index (BMI) and student health behaviors. A total of 4603 students were assessed at the beginning of sixth grade and the end of eighth grade. Process evaluation data were collected throughout the course of the intervention. All analyses were adjusted for students' baseline values. For this paper, the students in the schools randomized to receive the intervention were further divided into two groups: those who participated in public commitment activities and those who did not. Students from comparable schools randomized to the assessment condition constituted the control group.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We found a lower percentage of obesity (greater than or equal to the 95^thpercentile for BMI) at the end of the study among the group participating in public commitment activities compared to the control group (21.5% vs. 26.6%, p = 0.02). The difference in obesity rates at the end of the study was even greater among the subgroup of students who were overweight or obese at baseline; 44.6% for the "public commitment" group, versus 53.2% for the control group (p = 0.01). There was no difference in obesity rates between the group not participating in public commitment activities and the control group (26.4% vs. 26.6%).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Participating in public commitment activities during the HEALTHY study may have potentiated the changes promoted by the behavioral, nutrition, and physical activity intervention components.</p> <p>Trial Registration</p> <p>ClinicalTrials.gov number, <a href="http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00458029">NCT00458029</a></p

Organization Theory and New Ways of Working in Science

Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy 2011This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. ©2011 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.Dramatic changes in the practice of science over the past half a century, including trends towards working in teams and on large interdisciplinary and geographically distributed projects, have created opportunities and challenges for scientists. We argue that these changes in science also create opportunities and challenges for organization theory.National Science Foundation (U.S.

My pet rock and me: An experimental exploration of the self extension concept

We examine Belk&apos;s (1988) construct of self extension experimentally. Participants were given a small rock and randomly assigned to design the rock for themselves or to sell. The participants who designed the rock for themselves were more likely than sellers to say the rock symbolized themselves. Participants whose rock symbolized themselves rated its personality more similarly to their ratings of themselves than did other participants, and were less agreeable to making their rock into a product line of pet rocks. We explore process explanations for our results. EXTENDED ABSTRACT Belk&apos;s (1988) construct of self extension is widely cited but has been criticized as difficult to test empirically (e.g., Cohen 1989). We examined the construct of self extension experimentally. Participants each were given a small rock and randomly assigned to design a pet rock for themselves or to sell. We developed hypotheses about a possible cause and two consequences of self extension from Belk (1988), Wicklund &amp; Gollwitzer (1982), and Burris and Rempel&apos;s (2004) self theory. We hypothesized that those designing the rock for themselves would be more likely to experience self-extension to the rock than would participants designing the rock for sale. We also hypothesized that participants who experienced a feeling of self extension to the rock would perceive the rock to be more similar to themselves, and more unique, than those who did not experience a feeling of self extension to the rock. Participants were 106 volunteer undergraduate students. They each were given a Mexican river rock and were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions--design the rock for yourself (Self condition) or design the rock to sell (Seller condition). All participants returned a week later with their decorated ..