VOSS: Collaborative Research: Sharing Insights Across Multiple Virtual Organizations

通过虚拟组织进行协作对于分析和解决诸如防止恐怖分子、了解业务风险、追踪疾病爆发以及进行刑事调查等问题至关重要。尽管如此，由于缺乏以协作方式利用大量动态共享信息的技术和组织框架，这些协作可能无法将各个点连接起来。一个关键的研究问题是如何支持协作组织处理和跟踪来自不同来源的分散且通常是意外的信息的能力。本研究将对组织间合作调查分析有一个基本的了解。调查人员正在与虚拟组织的成员进行访谈和控制实验室研究，以检查可能增加跨组织边界信息使用的干预措施，并开发和评估完成这些干预措施的工具。这项研究在三个方面做出了贡献：(a)理解跨组织边界的分析过程如何在人们如何使用共享但意外的信息中得到证明；(b)理解在大量动态信息的环境中管理协作分析的不同方法的收益和成本；(c)设计和测试提供信息的接口的有效性，以支持多组织协作中的紧急关注和责任承担。该项目将为刑事司法、情报、科学和流行病学等领域的合作调查分析提供信息。研究结果可能会为这些领域的分析人员提供新的可视化工具，为提高协作分析质量的组织实践提供建议，为培训专业分析人员解决复杂、相互关联的问题提供新方法，并为情报、流行病学分析和刑事司法等领域的研究生课程提供学习工具。这项研究也将涉及本科生和研究生，并将为他们提供跨学科研究方面的进一步培训和教育。

Collaboration through virtual organizations is crucial for analyzing and tackling problems such as preventing terrorists, understanding business risks, tracing outbreaks of disease, and conducting criminal investigations. Nonetheless, these collaborations can fail to connect the dots for lack of a technological and organizational framework for leveraging large amounts of dynamic shared information collaboratively. A key research question is how to support the ability of collaborating organizations to attend to and follow up on scattered and often unexpected information from different sources. This research will gain a fundamental understanding of inter-organizational collaborative investigative analysis. The investigators are conducting interviews with members of virtual organizations and controlled laboratory studies to examine interventions that might increase information use across organizational boundaries, and developing and evaluating tools to accomplish these interventions. The research contributes in three areas: (a) understanding how analytical processes across organizational boundaries are evidenced in how people make use of shared but unexpected information, (b) understanding the benefits and costs of different methods for managing collaborative analysis in an environment of large amounts of dynamic information, and (c) designing and testing the effectiveness of interfaces that provide information to support emergent attention and responsibility taking in a multi-organizational collaboration. This project will inform collaborative investigative analysis in fields such as criminal justice, intelligence, science, and epidemiology. The results could lead to new visualization tools for analysts in these areas, recommendations for organizational practices to improve the quality of collaborative analysis, new methods for training professional analysts to solve complex, interconnected problems, and learning tools for graduate programs in fields such as intelligence and epidemiological analysis and criminal justice. The research will also involve undergraduate and graduate students, and will result in their further training and education in interdisciplinary research.