ICS News Archive

Professor Gloria Mark Awarded Collaborative NSF Future of Work Grant

The future of teamwork will require the integration of technological advances to facilitate team performance, yet we are largely relying on tools and techniques from the 20th century for team facilitation. This is the problem to be addressed in a new National Science Foundation (NSF) collaborative grant awarded to Informatics Professor Gloria Mark in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). The Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier program, under which the grant is awarded, is one of the NSF’s 10 Big Ideas.

UCI is the lead for the grant, “Intelligent Facilitation for Teams of the Future via Longitudinal Sensing in Context,” with Stephan Mandt as co-PI, and the $1.1 million in funding is split between UCI, the University of Notre Dame and the University of Colorado.

The project aims to develop and validate an AI-based team facilitator using sensing and dynamic intervention to promote better team coordination, increase performance and ultimately lower worker burnout. Once the facilitator is developed, the performance of teams using it will be experimentally compared against matched controls in a longitudinal in situ study. As the abstract outlines, the study’s results will contribute to “a new understanding on how 21st century teams can manage complexity.”

— Shani Murray…