Enriching Online Collaboration with Multimodal Interactions

我的研究重点是提高在线协作系统的沟通能力，使用人机交互的方法。随着知识工作越来越多地转移到网上，数字工具已经成为一种基本的社会技术基础设施，使我们能够超越空间和时间的限制进行协作，用远程和异步的中介通信取代一些面对面的会议。然而，现有的工具（如电子邮件、注释、Git）主要依赖于文本，导致缺乏微妙的细微差别和情感，而面对面的会议是人们可以交谈、凝视和做手势的最佳方式。我的研究通过为异步协作工具注入丰富的多模态交互，即通过多个输入通道（例如，录制语音，手写笔书写，捕获手势）进行交互，独特地解决了这种表达能力的缺陷。******长期目标是建立和研究丰富的协作系统，这是一种新的在线工具类型，它结合了这两个世界的优势，异步数字通信的灵活性和可扩展性，以及面对面多模式交互的丰富性和表现力。这一总体议程分为三个研究方向：(1)开发支持富媒体消息高效创建和编辑的多模态交互；(2)通过转换和匿名化他们的多模态消息，同时保留消息的真实丰富性，帮助人们克服基于富媒体通信的心理障碍（例如，隐私问题、语言焦虑）；(3)为可容纳大量用户的基于富媒体的在线社区开发可扩展的多模态交互。******丰富在线协作以捕捉细微差别和情感有可能对知识工作的质量和速度产生变革性影响。除了对学术研究和行业实践产生直接影响外，拟议的研究还将产生具有独特跨学科技能的HQP，例如多模式交互设计、多媒体软件开发和协作工具的生态评估。这些未来的专业人士可以在加拿大公司开发高价值产品所需的跨学科实践中发挥协同作用，包括在不列颠哥伦比亚省技术部门和卡斯卡迪亚创新走廊的技术中心及其周围的公司。

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.