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

新的虚拟技术的出现正在全球范围内实现人类之间联系的新时代。这导致了基于视频的团队的新一轮增长，使用智能设备开发高效、成功和健康的人际互动变得至关重要。此外，COVID-19疫情进一步刺激了向数字平台的迁移，增加了互动、多样性和包容性的障碍。由于视频会议（以及虚拟会议）极有可能在疫情结束后仍将持续很长一段时间，因此有必要建立更具包容性和公平性的环境，以支持不同虚拟团队环境中的生产力和协作创造力。该项目将设计一种新型的智能会议助理（SMA），作为一种变革性的解决方案，以有效地增强基于视频的团队创新。SMA的高级别目标是促进实现以下目标：㈠协作创造力; ㈡通过将类似主题的想法集中起来进行聚合思考; ㈢通过视频会议提出的想法的可行性; ㈣减少视频团队的偏见。该项目小组包括来自德克萨斯州一个农村服务机构和一个西班牙裔服务机构以及科罗拉多一个中型公共机构的研究人员。试点研究的参与者包括来自不同背景的学生和来自现实世界的工人。这个跨学科的项目将使用混合方法来研究影响用户社交和认知健康的虚拟会议平台的人际互动和功能。SMA的设计为引入深度学习和数据分析的最新进展铺平了道路，由心理科学支持，重点关注人为因素和人体工程学，设计虚拟社会技术系统，促进协作创新，而不会危及基于视频的团队的社会和认知健康。首先，项目团队将更广泛地了解人们如何在虚拟群体互动中感知创造力，幸福感和公平性。随后，一项扩大的试点研究将探索基本会议功能（例如，发言时间，会议持续时间）和社会认知变量（例如，知识共享程度，满意度）在统计上相互作用，以预测不同（性别和多元文化）基于视频的团队中的协作创造力，幸福感和公平性。最后，研究团队将开展基础工作，设计一个由智能会议助理辅助的社会认知培训模块，以促进基于视频的环境中的协作创造力，福祉和公平。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.