This workshop is part of CSCW 2010.

About the Workshop

In 1992 Bill Buxton coined the term telepresence, defining it as "the use of technology to establish a sense of shared presence or shared space among separated members of a group" [Buxton92]*. In the mid-1990's Microsoft's NetMeeting became the first widely-distributed client for telepresence, including voice, video, whiteboard-like drawing, application- and screen-sharing. Subsequently these features became even more widely available as they were integrated into instant-messaging clients. Skype arrived in 2006 and extended the prevalence of two- and multi-party videoconferencing even more broadly. Webcams are a popular computer accessory and have increasingly been integrated directly into laptop and desktop monitors. Companies such as Polycom, Tandberg and LifeSize have raised the quality of the audiovisual experience. Cisco and HP have pushed the quality to new levels. Mobile phones with front-facing cameras are poised to make videoconferencing mobile and ubiquitous. Telepresence, or at least real-time streaming of sound, video and computer screens, is a fait accompli - or so it might seem.

We believe that the academic community and the marketplace have only scratched the surface of telepresence, and that there's a lot of deep digging left to do. In particular we believe that the current conception of telepresence solely as a videoconference meeting misses many opportunities for innovation.

One limitation of our current conception of telepresence is that our community tends to think of a meeting as a monolithic thing. But in reality meetings are varied and diverse in many ways: the number of people, the topology of distribution, the goals of the meeting, the history and relationships among the participants, etc. All of these facets imply a diversity of requirements on the meetings. How can understanding the particular needs of specific types and attributes of meetings spur technological innovation?

Another limitation of our conception is that we think of telepresence as what happens during a distributed meeting or call - minutes through hours. But interactions among a pair or group of people span days, months, or years. How does the suite of telepresence experiences play out in the long term? How could they change to better support desired long-term effects? How does telepresence dovetail with other media, such as face-to-face, IM, email, file sharing, etc., and support conversations that flow across media? How does telepresence contribute to relationship-building?

This one-day workshop will bring together people who are passionate about breaking out of the box of telepresence-as-videoconference to inspire and cross-pollinate ideas.

The goal of this workshop is an in-depth exchange of ideas. The workshop will be limited to 12 participants plus the four organizers. The organizers will distribute hardcopies of the position papers at least two weeks before the event. All participants are expected to read them beforehand.

To go beyond the immediate goal of exchanging ideas among the workshop participants, the organizers will summarize the results of the workshop as an article, which will be submitted to Interactions magazine. The structure and content of the article will be drawn from the discussions at the workshop. The workshop participants will be acknowledged in the article submission.

*We use the word telepresence in Buxton's sense of group work, not in the sense of teleoperation.

Workshop Activities

The Soapbox Madness is a series of brief discussions on topics presented by the workshop participants and organizers themselves. In the Call for Participation below we ask that you submit a few topics that are important to you. During the workshop each participant will be given one minute to present a soapbox topic (no slides!) and then four minutes to lead a discussion on the topic. The point of Soapbox Madness is not to present your research (that comes later in the day) but to get people thinking.

During the position paper presentations all participants and organizers will be given five minutes to present his position paper, followed by four minutes for questions and discussion. We may adjust the timing to accommodate the number participants. A video projector will be provided.

During lunch the organizers, and any participants who wish to participate, will perform a card sort on the topics raised during the Soapbox Madness and position papers in order to identify three leading topics. Participants will self-select into three breakout sessions. The first half of the breakout session will be used for general discussion and ideation about the topic; during the second, the participants will outline the concepts they discussed.

Call for Participation

If you are interested in participating in this workshop you must submit a position paper describing your work in progress and 1-5 soapbox topics by email to ginav@microsoft.com by November 20, 2009.

Your position paper should be no longer than 4 printed pages. You may use the ACM template if you like. Your submission should be emailed in a common format (e.g. PDF, Word or HTML).

For your soapbox topics, think of the things about telepresence that are driving you, motivating you, irritating you or capturing your imagination. Think of grand challenges, little tweaks and everything in between. Your soapbox topics should be aimed at starting a conversation. You may find it helpful to phrase them as questions. Write down just a few sentences for up to five soapbox topics, and include them in the email when you submit your position paper.

The workshop organizers will review the position papers and soapbox topics for pertinence to the workshop theme, general interest and quality.  A maximum of 12 submissions will be accepted.  Notification of acceptance will be sent by email on December 11, 2009.

Participants may revise their submissions before January 8, 2010.  The organizers will distribute hard- and soft-copies of the position papers and soapbox topics to all participants by January 15.  Participants are strongly encouraged to read all of this material before the workshop.

Organizers

Gina Venolia (ginav@microsoft.com) 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 studies collocated and geographically-distributed software development teams and builds tools mitigate their problems. She has co-organized three prior workshops: Supporting Distributed Team Work (CSCW 2008), Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (ICSE 2008), Supporting the Social Side of Large-scale Software Development (CSCW 2006).

Kori Inkpen (kori@microsoft.com) is a senior researcher with Microsoft Research in the VIBE Connect group. The goal of her research is to explore alternative computing environments to support natural, seamless collaborative interactions. This includes face-to-face as well as distributed computing environments. She has previously co-organized several workshops including: Workshop on Methodology for Evaluating Collaboration Behaviour in Co-Located Environments (CSCW 2004), Collaboration with Interactive Walls and Tables (UbiComp 2002), Shared Environments to Support Face-to-Face Collaboration (CSCW 2000).

Judith S. Olson (jsolson@uci.edu) is the Donald Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Irvine, with courtesy appointments in the Merage School of Business and the School of Social Ecology. Her research focuses on the tools and social practices that surround successful and failed distributed teams. Her field work has looked at distributed teams of scientists, culminating in four chapters in the book, Scientific Collaboration on the Internet, MIT Press. She has also studied distributed teams in the laboratory using an "organizational simulation," or serious game, finding ingroup biases in people who are collocated, and the ways in which trust is built through various communication technologies. Judy is a member of the CHI Academy, won CHI's Lifetime Achievement award with her husband and collaborator, Gary Olson, and this year became an ACM Fellow.

David T. Nguyen (david.t.nguyen@accenture.com) is a research scientist at Accenture Technology Labs. His research focuses on Human-Computer Interactions with an emphasis on collaboration technology. At Accenture, he currently explores ways collaboration technologies can improve the way consulting teams can deliver work. He is the inventor of MultiView, the first video conferencing system to support correct eye contact in many-to-many meetings by using 3-dimensional display techniques. David first experimented with electronic communication when he ran one of the first regional, multiline, online bulletin board system (BBS) called the Logic Board in CT in 1994. 14 years later, David received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2008.

References

Buxton, W. (1992). Telepresence: integrating shared task and person spaces. Proceedings of Graphics Interface '92, 123-129. 

Participants

*Organizer

Position Papers

• Addressing the Opportunities and Challenges of Working Anytime from Anywhere - Biehl et al.
• Gaze and Gestures in Telepresence: multimodality, embodiment, and roles of collaboration - Cherubini et al.
• Towards 3D-Aware Telepresence: Working on Technologies Behind the Scene - Divorra et al.
• Moving Telepresence Out of the Conference Room - Hofer et al.
• Using annotated meeting records to form an organizational knowledge repository - Jacoby
• Telepresence in Virtual Conferences: An Empirical Comparison of Distance Collaboration Technologies - Erickson et al.
• Sociometric Feedback: Bringing Social Signals to Telepresence - Kim and Pentland
• Telepresence: Space, Self, and Stuff - Rohall
• Physicality Matters - Sirkin and Ju
• Enhancing Expressiveness in Reference Space - Tang et al.

Organizers

• Gina Venolia, Microsoft Research
• Kori Inkpen, Microsoft Research
• Judy Olson, UC Irvine
• David Nguyen, Accenture Labs

Important Dates

• November 20, 2009 - Position papers due
• December 11, 2009 - Notification of acceptance
• January 8, 2010 - Final position papers due
• January 15, 2010 - Organizers distribute position papers and soapbox topics to all participants
• February 7, 2010 - Workshop

Related Links

• This event on Facebook
• CSCW 2010 program