A wealth of data and a poverty of coordination: The impact of misaligned priorities in a cyberinfrastructure project
Speaker
Thomas A. Finholt
Associate Professor, School of Information, University of Michigan
When
-
Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)
Description
The recent report of the NSF blue-ribbon panel on cyberinfrastructure portrays a bold future for Internet-mediated scientific and engineering research, particularly through extensive organization of geographically dispersed collaborations. Yet, as Cummings and Kiesler (2003) suggest, there are tremendous barriers to successful collaboration at a distance. This talk examines whether the current trajectory of cyberinfrastructure development is aligned to address the critical needs of distributed collaborators. Specifically, instances of prototypical cyberinfrastructure development, such as the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), strongly emphasize data acquisition, transmission, access and storage as the keys to effective dispersed collaboration. Yet ironically, the most significant early contributions of the NEES effort have been the discovery and elaboration of long distance communication and coordination mechanisms—mostly as byproducts of the larger NEES effort. The talk concludes with speculation about why data is valued so highly relative to communication and coordination in proposed cyberinfrastructure development, and how HCI and CSCW researchers can help redress this imbalance.
Speaker's Bio
Thomas A. Finholt. Dr. Finholt is the director of the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work, at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, where he is also a research associate professor. He received his Ph.D. in social and decision sciences from Carnegie Mellon University in 1993 and his B.A. with high honors from Swarthmore College in 1983. Dr. Finholts current research focuses on the design, deployment, and use of cyberinfrastructure in science and engineering. He was a co-developer of the worlds first operational collaboratory, the Upper Atmospheric Research Collaboratory (UARC), and his recent work has focused on the development of NEESgrid, the collaboratory component of the NSF’s George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). In addition, Dr. Finholt is a Co-PI on the Science of Collaboratories effort, an NSF ITR project to identify and disseminate successful design principles for cyberinfrastructure-based science and engineering research. Examples of Dr. Finholt’s previous research include studies of: the impact of geographic dispersion and computer-mediated communication on trust and performance in virtual teams (a collaborative project with Bell Labs); the design and use of collaboratories for manufacturing engineering (funded by NIST), for radiology and for space physics (funded by NSF); the design and administration of online surveys (funded by NSF); and the impact of access to archived digital content on scholarly practice (sponsored by the Mellon Foundation).
Speaker's Website
https://www.si.umich.edu/people/thomas-finholt
Host
Jim Herbsleb