Current research projects:


Multi-tasking, attention focus, and digital media use:  Over the last several years we have been studying how digital media affects people’s lives. Rather than bring people into a laboratory, I view the real world as a living laboratory--I go where people live, study, and work, to study them as they go about their normal activities. Digital media use affects people’s mood, stress, and behavior quite significantly. In particular, people experience disruptions when working with digital media due to multi-tasking and interruptions. We have studied people in domains ranging from information workers in the workplace to college students in their academic life. We use an array of sensors to measure behavior: stress, mood, focus, interaction, and computer and phone activity. We are exploring how IT can support information organization in a way consistent with a more natural way of organizing work, in terms of thematically connected units of work, or what we term working spheres.


Some selected publications:


Multitasking in the Digital Age, Morgan Claypool (2015). (Book)


Effects of individual differences in blocking workplace distractions. Proceedings of ACM CHI 2018, ACM Press (with Mary Czerwinski and Shamsi Iqbal).


The context of college students’ Facebook use and academic performance: An empirical study. Proceedings of ACM CHI 2018 (with Yiran Wang). 


Supporting workplace detachment and reattachment with conversational intelligence. Proceddings of ACM CHI 2018 (with Alex Williams, Harmanpreet Kaur, Anne Loomis Thompson, Shamsi Iqbal and Jaime Teevan).


Engaging with political and social issues on Facebook in College Life. Proceedings of CSCW 2017 (with Yiran Wang).


Shining (blue) light on creative ability. Proceedings of ACM UbiComp 2016, ACM Press (with Saeed Abdullah, Mary Czerwinski, and Paul Johns).


Sleep debt in student life: Online attention focus, Facebook and mood. Proceedings of ACM CHI 2016, ACM Press (with Yiran Wang, Melissa Niiya, and Stephanie Reich).


Email duration, batching, and self-interruption: Patterns of email use on productivity and stress. Proceedings of ACM CHI 2016, ACM Press. (With Shamsi Iqbal, Mary Czerwinski, Paul Johns, and Akane Sano). 


Neurotics can’t focus: An in situ study of multitasking in the workplace.  Proceedings of ACM CHI 2016, ACM Press. (With Shamsi Iqbal, Mary Czerwinski, Paul Johns, and Akane Sano). 


Promoting positive affect through smartphone photography (2016). Psychology of Well-Being: Theory, Research and Practice. July 4, 6(1):8 (with Yu Chen and Sanna Ali).


Coming of Age (Digitally): An Ecological View of Social Media Use among College Students. Proceedings of CSCW 2015, ACM Press. (with Yiran Wang, Melissa Niiya, Stephanie Reich, and Mark Warschauer)   


Focused, aroused, but so distractible:  A temporal perspective on multitasking and communications. Proceedings of CSCW 2015, ACM Press. (with Shamsi Iqbal, Mary Czerwinski and Paul Johns) Honorable Mention for Best Paper.  


Bored Mondays and Focused Afternoons: The Rhythm of Attention and Online Activity in the Workplace

Proceedings of ACM CHI 2014 (with Shamsi Iqbal, Mary Czerwinski and Paul Johns)

Honorable Mention for Best Paper. 


Stress and multitasking in everyday college life: An empirical study of online activity

Proceedings of ACM CHI 2014 (with Yiran Wang and Melissa Niiya)

Honorable Mention for Best Paper. 


Capturing the Mood: Facebook and Face-to-Face Encounters in the Workplace.

Proceedings of CSCW 2014 (with Shamsi Iqbal, Mary Czerwinski and Paul Johns


Most Liked, Fewest Friends: Patterns of Enterprise Social Media Use

Proceedings of CSCW 2014 (with Ido Guy, Shiri Kramer-Davidson, Michal Jacovi) 

Honorable Mention for Best Paper. 


“A Pace not dictated by electrons”: An empirical study of work without email  

Proceedings of ACM CHI 2012  (with Stephen Voida and Armand Cardello)

Honorable Mention for Best Paper. 


Why do I keep interrupting myself? Environment, habit, and self-interruption

Proceedings of ACM CHI 2011  (with Laura Dabbish and Victor Gonzalez)


The Japanese Garden: Task awareness for collaborative multitasking

Proceedings of ACM Group 2010  (with Hideto Yuzawa)


The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress.

Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008  (with Daniela Gudith and Ulrich Klocke)


Communication Chains and Multitasking.

Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 (with Norman Su)


Workplace connectors as Facilitators for Work.

Proceedings of Communities and Technologies (C&T’07) (with Norman Su and Stewart Sutton)


No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work.

Proceedings of ACM CHI 2005 (with Victor Gonzalez and Justin Harris)


Managing currents of work: Multi-tasking among multiple collaborations.

Proceedings of ECSCW’05 (the European Conference of Computer-supported Cooperative Work) (with Victor Gonzalez)


"Constant, Constant, Multi-tasking Craziness”: Managing Multiple Working Spheres.

Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004 (with Victor Gonzalez)


Technology use in disrupted environments: When there is a major environmental disruption such as a natural disaster or war, it is not only the technical infrastructure that needs to be repaired but also the human infrastructure. I am currently studying collaboration resilience-the extent to which people continue to work and socialize despite such a disruption. In this project we are examining the role that information technology plays in helping people repair their human infrastructure. We are focusing on the use of Web 2.0 technologies: blogs, wikis, social networking sites, video-sharing, and others that people use to be resilient in their work and lives during an environmental disruption.



Some selected publications:


“Narco” Emotions: Affect and Desensitization in Social Media during the Mexican Drug War

Proceedings of ACM CHI 2014 (with Munmun de Choudhury and Andres Monroy-Hernandez)

SIGCHI Best of CHI Best Paper Award  


Blogs as a Collective War Diary

Proceedings of ACM CSCW 2012 (with Mossaab Bagdouri, Leysia Palen, James Martin, Ban Al-Ani and Ken Anderson)


Technology-Mediated Social Arrangements to Resolve

Breakdowns in Infrastructure During Ongoing Disruption

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), vol 18, issue 4 (Dec. 2011), 1-21


The Egyptian blogosphere: A counter-narrative of the revolution

Proceedings of ACM CSCW 2012 (with Ban Al-Ani, Justin Chung, and Jennifer Jones)

Honorable Mention for Best Paper


‘Facebooking’ towards crisis recovery and beyond: Disruption as an opportunity

Proceedings of ACM CSCW 2012 (with Bryan Semaan)


Creating a context of trust with ICTs: Restoring a sense of normalcy in the environment

Proceedings of ACM CSCW 2011 (with Bryan Semaan)


Blogging in a Region of Conflict: Supporting Transition to Recovery.

Proceedings of ACM CHI 2010 (with Ban Al-Ani and Bryan Semaan)

Honorable mention for best paper


Resilience Through Technology Adoption:

Merging the Old and the New in Iraq

Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 (with Ban Al-Ani and Bryan Semaan)


Resilience in Collaboration: Technology as a Resource for New Patterns of Action

Proceedings of ACM CSCW 2008 (with Bryan Semaan)




Collaboration and distributed interaction, new organizational forms: Collaboration is becoming ubiquitious; at the same time the emergence of new technologies have been changing the landscape of interaction and collaboration. I am interested in the effect that information technologies have on collaboration and the development of new organizational practices such as network-centricity, group-to-group collaboration, nomadic work, and large-scale collaboration. I am also very interested in how Web 2.0 technologies (blogs, wikis, social-networking sites, etc.) are used in collaboration and how they can be integrated into the course of daily work.


Some selected publications:


Making infrastructure visible for nomadic work. Pervasive and Mobile Computing (2010).


Designing for Nomadic Work. Proceedings of Designing Interactive Systems '08 (with Norman Su)


Transitioning to Network-Centricity: Overcoming Hierarchical Anchors.  ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology (CHIMIT’07) (with Steve Abrams)


The Human Infrastructure of Cyberinfrastructure. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on CSCW (CSCW’06) (with Charlotte Lee and Paul Dourish)


Group-to-Group Distance Collaboration: Examining the “Space Between”. Proceedings of the 8th European Conference of Computer-supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW’03), (with Steve Abrams and Nayla Nassif).


Groupware Adoption in a Distributed Organization: Transporting and transforming technology through social worlds, Information and Organization (with Steven Poltrock)


Why Distance Matters: Effects on Cooperation, Persuasion and Deception. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on CSCW (CSCW’02) (with Erin Bradner)


Extreme Collaboration. Communications of the ACM


Conventions and commitments in distributed CSCW groups. CSCW Journal