Enriching Online Collaboration with Multimodal Interactions

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The focus of my research is enhancing the communicative capacities of online collaboration systems, using human-computer interaction approaches. As knowledge work moves increasingly online, digital tools have become a baseline sociotechnical infrastructure that enables us to collaborate beyond the constraints of space and time, substituting some in-person meetings with distant and asynchronous mediated-communication. However, existing tools (e.g., email, annotations, Git) rely primarily on text, resulting in a lack of subtle nuances and emotions that are best conveyed through face-to-face meetings where people can talk, gaze, and gesture. My research uniquely addresses this deficit of expressivity by imbuing asynchronous collaboration tools with rich multimodal interactions, i.e., interactions through multiple input channels (e.g., recorded speech, stylus writing, captured gestures).******The long-term goal is to build and study rich collaboration systems, a new genre of online tools that unites the advantages of both worlds, the flexibility and scalability of asynchronous digital communication together with the richness and expressivity of face-to-face multimodal interactions. This overarching agenda is broken down into the three research threads: (1) developing multimodal interactions that support efficient creation and editing of rich media messages, (2) helping people overcome psychological barriers of rich media-based communication (e.g., privacy concerns, speech anxiety) by transducing and anonymizing their multimodal messages while retaining the authentic richness of the messages, and (3) developing scalable multimodal interactions for a rich media-based online community that can host a large number of users.******Enriching online collaboration to capture nuances and emotions has potential to make a transformative impact on the quality and speed of knowledge work. In addition to the immediate impact on academic research and industry practice, the proposed research will produce HQP armed with unique interdisciplinary skillsets, such as multimodal interaction design, multimedia software development, and ecological evaluation of collaboration tools. These future professionals can play a synergistic role in the interdisciplinary practices required to develop high-value products in Canadian companies, including those in and around the tech hubs of the British Columbia technology sectors and the Cascadia innovation corridor.