Hello everyone - please join us for this last HCIL Seminar of the semester.
If you'd like to meet with Gina during her visit or join lunch, please let
Ben Bederson ([log in to unmask]) know.


Gina Venolia - Microsoft Research

Friday, May 7 @ 2pm

HCIL Lab - 2119 Hornbake Library, South Wing



Title: Embodied Social Proxies: Connecting Hub and Satellite Teams

Abstract: Current business conditions have given rise to distributed teams
that are mostly collocated except for one remote member. These
"hub-and-satellite" teams face the challenge of the satellite colleague
being out-of-sight and out-of-mind. We developed a telepresence device,
called an Embodied Social Proxy (ESP), which represents the satellite
coworker 24x7. Beyond using ESPs in our own group, we deployed an ESP in
four product teams within our company for six weeks. We studied how ESP was
used through ethnographic observations, surveys, and usage log data. ESP not
only increased the satellite worker's ability to fully participate in
meetings, it also increased the hub's attention and affinity towards the
satellite. The continuous physical presence of ESP in each team improved the
interpersonal social connections between hub and satellite colleagues.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/ESPProject/



Title: Five Projects Toward Spatial Representations of Software

Abstract: Our group has had a longstanding design intuition that a stable,
spatial representation of code could benefit software developers. A code
"map" could help a developer stay oriented in code, see relationships and
other overlays, and provide a common artifact to anchor developers'
conversations. We have done a series of tools and studies around the idea. I
will describe these systems, highlighting our understanding of spatial code
has evolved, and finish with a demo of Code Canvas, our latest prototype.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/SpatialCode/



Bio: Gina Venolia is a senior researcher with Microsoft Research in the
Human Interactions of Programming group. Her research focuses on
understanding how knowledge flows among people and building systems to make
it flow more freely. She is currently studying collocated and
geographically-distributed software development teams, building tools that
help developers find and communicate about the knowledge behind the code,
and developing systems that exploit spatial memory to support navigation,
team awareness, and communication about code.
http://research.microsoft.com/~ginav