Hiring: Researcher - Postdoc (2 year fixed term)
Help advance the state of the art in effective, comfortable, and adaptable remote and hybrid telepresence. We are seeking an ambitious Post-Doctoral HCI researcher who wants to have…
Sean Rintel
Principal Researcher
Highlights
The Socially Intelligent Meetings workstream
The Socially Intelligent Meetings program explores social and technological interventions for making work-oriented telepresence effective, comfortable, adaptable, and robust. The guiding principle are are that telepresence technologies should…
News: Where’s the spark? How lockdown caused a creativity crisis
EXCERPT: “Longer-term, technology will adapt to foster creativity, says Sean Rintel, principal researcher at Microsoft. Using augmented or virtual reality headsets to “bridge the physical-digital divide and improve…
Project: VROOM: Virtual Robot Overlay for Online Meetings
Telepresence robots allow remote users to freely explore a space they are not in, and provide a physical embodiment in that space. However, they lack a compelling representation of…
About
I am a Principal Researcher in human-computer interaction exploring the Future of Work at Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK). As a sociologist of communication technology, I investigate how the design of communication technologies interacts with language, action, and culture. I am currently focused on Socially Intelligent Meetings — social and technological interventions for making organizational remote and hybrid telepresence effective, comfortable, and adaptable, ranging from traditional videoconferencing to future cross-reality systems. I have been a member of four global category first-place winning projects in Microsoft OneWeek Hackathons. I have been a PC member of CHI and CSCW, and reviewed for many HCI and communication journals and conferences.
Interests
I am interested in video-mediated collaboration, enterprise social media platforms, cross-device interaction and device ecologies, engineering culture, tangible data visualisation of cloud data, and research-product group alignment. Most of my publications cover technologized interaction across a range of contexts, such as enterprise and personal video-mediated communication in various forms, online freelancing, ambient audio technologies to support independent living, IRC openings and non-responses, social media in the workplace, crisis memes, error mascots, Internet culture, and cross-device interaction in video-mediated collaboration and slideware. I have also explored membership categorisation analysis and omnirelevance.
Approach
My approach is ethnomethodological, drawing on ethnographic data and analysing that data using qualitative methods such as conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis. I specialize in field research but also conduct interview, diary, and survey studies, as well as lab-based studies of prototypes.
Hackathons
I have been a member of four global category first-place winning projects in Microsoft OneWeek Hackathons. You can read about the first of these in our Garage Wall of Fame post Mobile Sharing and Companion Experiences for Microsoft Teams Meetings. One day I might even be able to say what the other ones were! 😉
Academic
I received my PhD in 2010 in the field of Sociology specializing in Communication, from the University at Albany, State University of New York. My dissertation was chaired by Professor Emerita Anita Pomerantz with committee members Professor Teresa Harrison, Professor Glenna Spitze, and Professor Ronald Jacobs.
Prior to working at Microsoft I was a Lecturer in Strategic Communication at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
I have been a PC member of CHI and CSCW several times and reviewed for many major communication and technology journals and conferences. I was the Senior Editor of the Communication Technology section of the online Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. I have edited special issues of the Electronic Journal of Communication and the Australian Journal of Communication. I co-chaired the Microsoft 2020 New Future of Work Symposium (with Gloria Mark) and the 2012 conference of the Australasian Institute of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (with Richard Fitzgerald).
Digital Advocacy
I was the former Chair and a former Board Member of Electronic Frontiers Australia, a non-profit group advocating for digital access, freedom, and privacy.
Featured content
Hybrid workplace guides based on our research
Many organizations are deciding to adopt a hybrid way of working - one that allows employees to work from home or from the office depending on the job function and the needs of the business. As we re-enter the workplace, Microsoft research insights illustrate the need to learn new hybrid workplace skills and habits around core areas of work such as meetings and productivity.
(Re)Configuring Hybrid Meetings: Moving from User-Centered Design to Meeting-Centered Design
Despite sophisticated technologies for representational fidelity in hybrid meetings, in which co-located and remote participants collaborate via video or audio, meetings are still often disrupted by practical problems with trying to include remote participants. In this paper, we use micro-analysis of three disruptive moments in a hybrid meeting from a global software company to unpack blended technological and conversational practices of inclusion and exclusion. We argue that designing truly valuable experiences for hybrid meetings requires moving from the traditional, essentialist, and perception-obsessed user-centered design approach to a phenomenological approach to the needs of meetings themselves. We employ the metaphor of ‘configuring the meeting’ to propose that complex ecologies of people, technology, spatial, and institutional organization must be made relevant in the process of design.
“I can’t get round”: Recruiting Assistance in Mobile Robotic Telepresence
Via audiovisual communications and a controllable physical embodiment, Mobile Robotic telePresence (MRP) systems aim to support enhanced collaboration between remote and local members of a given setting. But MRP systems also put the remote user in positions where they frequently rely on the help of local partners. Getting or ‘recruiting’ such help can be done with various verbal and embodied actions ranging in explicitness. In this paper, we look at how such recruitment occurs in video data drawn from an experiment where pairs of participants (one local, one remote) performed a timed searching task. We find a prevalence of implicit recruitment methods and outline obstacles to effective recruitment that emerge due to communicative asymmetries that are built into MRP design. In a future where remote work becomes widespread, assistance through remote work technology like MRPs needs close examination at a fundamental interactional level, taking into account how communicative asymmetries are at play in everyday use of such technologies.
News: How research can enable more effective remote work
Due to recent events, millions of office workers have needed to rapidly adjust to working from home—learning new collaboration tools and best practices, re-thinking how to stay connected with colleagues outside the office, and adapting to new social norms around meetings. Working remotely presents both technical and social challenges, and researchers at Microsoft have been working across disciplines to understand and support both aspects of this challenge for decades.
Low Engagement As a Deliberate Practice of Remote Participants in Video Meetings
Video meeting research has long reported that technological constraints can lead to low engagement levels of remote participants. Under-reported, however, are the ways in which remote participants can choose their level of engagement, with the technology framing but not determining…
Product Feature: Mobile Sharing and Companion Experiences in Microsoft Teams
Mobile Sharing and Companion Experiences Video meetings traditionally limit each person to one device, hindering the ways that people can participate, share, and interact. Microsoft Teams empowers users to achieve more by using their computer and phone together as companions…