Principal Researcher
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…
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…
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…
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…
I explore the Future of Work at Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK). I am a human-computer interaction researcher interested in how the affordances of communication technologies interact with language, social action, and culture. I am currently focused on Socially Intelligent Meetings.
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…
Due to recent events, millions of office workers have needed to rapidly adjust to working from homeâlearning 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.
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 determiningâŚ
Participants in video meetings have long struggled with asymmetrical attention levels, especially when participants are distributed unevenly. While technological advances offer exciting opportunities to augment remote usersâ attention, the phenomenological complexity of attention means that to design attention-fostering features weâŚ
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 companionsâŚ
Corporations are increasingly empowering employees to hire on-demand workers via freelance platforms. We interviewed full-time employees of a global technology company who hired freelancers as part of their job responsibilities. While there has been prior work describing freelancersâ perspectives there has been little research on those that hire them, the âclientsâ, especially in the corporate context. We found that while freelance platforms reduce many administrative burdens, there are number of conditions in which using freelance platforms in a corporate context creates high transaction costs and power asymmetries that make it difficult for clients to negotiate work rights and responsibilities. This leads corporate employee clients to feel âstuck in the middleâ between their employer, the platform, and the freelancer. Ultimately, these transactions costs are a potential barrier to wider adoption. If corporations want to leverage the value of the freelance economy then better guardrails, guidelines, and perhaps even creative technology solutions will be needed.
