Spring 2011 Information Systems Distinguished Lecture
Working Together Apart
Donald Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences
University of California, Irvine
12:00pm Friday, 29 April 2011, ITE Lecture Hall VII
Our research group has been investigating the factors that make long distance teamwork work. I will review that work and talk about the issues that remain, the factors that technology and social practices can't solve–cultural differences and different timezones. And, I will introduce our "theory made practical," our turning the theory into an online assessment tool.
Judith Olson is the Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences in the Informatics Department at the UC Irvine, with courtesy appointments in the School of Social Ecology and the Merage School of Business. She has researched teams whose members are not collocated for over 20 years, summaries of which are found in her most cited paper, “Distance Matters,” (Olson & Olson, 2000), and in her key theoretical contribution in the book Scientific Collaboration on the Internet (Olson, Zimerman, and Bos, Eds., 2008). Her current work focuses on ways to verify the theory's components while at the same time helping new scientific collaborations succeed. She has studied distributed teams both in the field and in the laboratory, the latter focusing on the communication hurdles distributed teams have and the consequent underutilization of remote team members skills and the reduction in trust. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and with her husband and colleague, Gary Olson, holds the Lifetime Achievement award from the Special Interest Group in Computer Human Interaction.
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