Collaborative Research:FW-HTF-P: The Future of Virtual Teams: Enhancing Collaborative Creativity and Socio-cognitive wellbeing in Video-based Teams

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The emergence of novel virtual technologies is enabling a new era of connection between humans at a global level. This has led to a new wave of growth in the popularity of video-based teams, and it has become essential to develop productive, successful, and healthy human interactions using smart devices. Additionally, the migration to digital platforms that is further spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic has increased barriers to interactions, diversity, and inclusion. Due to the strong likelihood that videoconferencing (and thus virtual meetings) will continue for a long time after the pandemic ends, there is a need to develop more inclusive and equitable environments that support productivity and collaborative creativity in diverse virtual team contexts. The project will design a novel Smart Meeting Assistant (SMA) as a transformative solution to efficiently enhance video-based team innovation. The high-level goal of SMA will be to facilitate objectives such as: (i) collaborative creativity; (ii) convergent thinking by clustering of ideas from similar topics; (iii) feasibility of generated ideas through video-based meetings; (iv) reducing bias in video-based teams. The project team includes researchers from a rural-serving institution and a Hispanic-serving institution in Texas, and a mid-sized public institution in Colorado. Participants of pilot studies include students from diverse backgrounds and workers from real-world settings. This interdisciplinary project will use a mixed methodological approach to examine human interactions and features of virtual-meeting platforms that influence user’s social and cognitive wellbeing. Design of SMA paves the path for bringing the recent advances in deep learning and data analytics, supported by psychological sciences with a strong focus on human factors and ergonomics, to design virtual sociotechnical systems facilitating collaborative innovation without jeopardizing the social and cognitive wellbeing of video-based teams. First, the project team will develop a broader understanding of how people perceive creativity, wellbeing, and equity during virtual group interactions. Subsequently, an expanded pilot study will explore ways in which fundamental meeting features (e.g., speaking time, duration of meeting) and socio-cognitive variables (e.g., degree of knowledge sharing, satisfaction) statistically interact to predict collaborative creativity, wellbeing, and equity in diverse (gender and multicultural) video-based teams. Finally, the research team will carry out the foundational work to design a social-cognitive training module assisted by a Smart Meeting Assistant to facilitate collaborative creativity, wellbeing, and equity in the video-based environment.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.