Designing Group Annotations and
Process Visualizations for
Role-Based Collaboration
Gregorio Convertino, Anna Wu,
Xiaolong (Luke) Zhang, Craig H. Ganoe,
Blaine Hoffman and John M. Carroll
The Pennsylvania State University
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Background
• Role-based collaboration
– E.g., emergency management
• Common ground (CG)
– Mutual knowledge, beliefs, and protocols
– A precondition for efficient teamwork
•E.g., “a blind pass”
2
Previous Research
3
Mass Care
Face-to-Face
&
Computer-Supported
Collaboration (CSCW)
Environmental
Public Works
Public Works
Mass Care
4
Environmental
Experimenter
Public Works
E.M.
Team Map
Mass Care
Paper Study:
Face-to-Face
Setting
Environmental
Mass Care
Environmental
Public Works
5
Public Works
one-way
windows
Mass Care
Experimenter
CSCW
Setting
Environmental
Public Works
Mass Care
Environmental
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Research Focuses
•
Does common ground increase?
–
–
•
How does it increase?
–
•
Does it increase as people collaborate?
What are the effects of the media (FtF vs. CSCW)?
What are the underlying patterns and contents of
communication?
What are the implications for theory and design?
–
–
What explanations can we offer about CG building?
What tools can be used to increase the support for CG?
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Experimental Studies
• Emergency management planning on maps
– Find the best shelter among four to rescue a family from a flooded
area
– Also consider two alternative shelters.
• Three roles
– Public works, Environmental, and Mass Care experts
• Task materials
– Member
• Role-specific map
• Role description
• List of 15 “cons” about shelters (8 unshared and 7 shared risks)
– Each expert is biased toward a particular non-optimal solution.
– Team
• Large map
• Background information on the problem
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Findings
• Common ground increases through collaboration.
– Process measures
• Perceived common ground and awareness increase.
• Communication efficiency increases.
• Recall of alternative plans increases.
– Outcome measures
• Performance and satisfaction increase
– Completion time shortened.
– Plan optimality increases.
• Computer tools improve performances.
– CSCW groups faster than paper groups
– Higher initial plan optimality in CSCW groups than paper
groups
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New Questions
• How to help users better process and utilize
large and dynamic information corpora in
decision-making under uncertainty?
– Limited cognitive resources
• Cannot remember all relevant information
• Slow in sorting relevant information
– Bias in decision-making
• Stick to more familiar solutions
• Stick to solutions proposed earlier
• Our approach to address these issues
– Externalizing critical information to improve the
outcomes and processes of decision-making.
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Design Requirements
• Reducing cognitive load with information
visualization
– Categorizing and aggregating massive data
– Grouping complex, dense datasets in ways that
can be easily perceived
• Reducing decision bias with information
visualization
– Supporting information review and comparison
– Providing spatial and temporal context
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Design
• Annotation construction
– Information sharing
• Annotation aggregation
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Design (Cont.)
• Annotation classification and aggregation
• Annotation temporal context visualization
13
System Screenshots
14
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System Implementation
•
Java-based system
– Collaboration support
•
Our in-house BRIDGE toolkits to support group work
– Basic Resources for Integrated Distributed Group
Environments.
– Geo-information visualization support
•
GeoTools
– Open source GIS tools
– General visualization support
•
Java Swing
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Software Architecture
Tools
Annotate
Transfer
Annotation
Visualization
Server
Telepointer
role indication
Process
Visualization
Dual-view and Tool Manager
View
Data
Dual-pointer
Shared data
Features and styles
Shared awareness data
Zoom factor, viewports, role codes, selection
CORK duplicates shared objects and propagates changes
among multiple role-specific clients
J2EE
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GeoTools geospatial data
architecture
Pilot Study
Stimuli
1. Bar chart: overview of cons (risks) by shelter
2. Timeline: overview of actions by role and time
Research Questions
1. The bar chart visualization will help the group to
reduce judgment bias toward one shelter
2. The timeline visualization will encourage team
members to contribute more.
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Pilot Study
• 3-member team
– 2 confederates + 1 participant
• Planning Task
– Choose the best shelter and rank the
others
• Manipulation
– Induce early judgment bias
• Contents and order of annotations
manipulated by the confederates.
• Confederates’ actions are scripted.
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Study Design
Part 1
Bar Chart
(run 1)
Bar Chart
(run 2)
Timeline
(run 3)
Part 2
No Bar Chart
(run 1)
No Bar Chart
(run 2)
No Timeline
(run 3)
Part 3
Bar Chart
(run 1)
Bar Chart
(run 2)
No Timeline
(run 3)
No Bar Chart
(run 1)
No Bar Chart
(run 2)
Timeline
(run 3)
Part 4
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Preliminary Observations
•
More profound discussions on decisions.
–
–
•
Individual annotations vs. Comparing and reviewing
relevant annotations
Simple count vs. Criticality of annotations
Task completion time
–
–
•
Faster to find shelters with the least cons
Facilitating information processing with sorted, colorcoded, and contextualized information
Decision bias
–
Participants indicated visualization helped on
evaluating different choices.
–
Despite confederates’ efforts to mislead the result.
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Next Step
• Conduct formal experiments to study the effectiveness
and efficiency of these two visualization tools in
decision-making
– Tweaking tasks
• Giving annotations different weights
– Improving visualization tools
• Visualization tools to support more complex processes
– Situational awareness
• Dynamic
– Multi-scale and multi-facet information clustering and
aggregation
• Support analysis across different scale level.
• Support information classification and aggregation from different
aspects.
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More Information
• Common ground project
– http://cscl.ist.psu.edu
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