Let's Think Together! Assessing Shared Mental Models, Performance, and Trust in Human-Agent Teams

An emerging research agenda in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work focuses on human-agent teaming and AI agent's roles and effects in modern teamwork. In particular, one understudied key question centers around the construct of team cognition within human-agent teams. This study explores the unique nature of team dynamics in human-agent teams compared to human-human teams and the impact of team composition on perceived team cognition, team performance, and trust. In doing so, a mixed-method approach, including three team composition conditions (all human, human-human-agent, human-agent-agent), completed the team simulation NeoCITIES and completed shared mental model, trust, and perception measures. Results found that human-agent teams are similar to human-only teams in the iterative development of team cognition and the importance of communication to accelerating its development; however, human-agent teams are different in that action-related communication and explicitly shared goals are beneficial to developing team cognition. Additionally, human-agent teams trusted agent teammates less when working with only agents and no other humans, perceived less team cognition with agent teammates than human ones, and had significantly inconsistent levels of team mental model similarity when compared to human-only teams. This study contributes to Computer-Supported Cooperative Work in three significant ways: 1) advancing the existing research on human-agent teaming by shedding light on the relationship between humans and agents operating in collaborative environments, 2) characterizing team cognition development in human-agent teams; and 3) advancing real-world design recommendations that promote human-centered teaming agents and better integrate the two.

Strong eventual consistency of the collaborative editing framework WOOT

Commutative Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) are a promising new class of data structures for large-scale shared mutable content in applications that only require eventual consistency. The WithOut Operational Transforms (WOOT) framework is the first CRDT for collaborative text editing introduced by Oster et al. (In: Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). ACM, New York, pp 259–268, 2006a). Its eventual consistency property was verified only for a bounded model to date. While the consistency of many other previously published CRDTs had been shown immediately with their publication, the property for WOOT remained open for 14 years. We use a novel approach identifying a previously unknown sort-key based protocol that simulates the WOOT framework to show its consistency. We formalize the proof using the Isabelle/HOL proof assistant to machine-check its correctness.

Kollaboration mit Extended-Reality-Systemen – eine Kategorisierung

ZusammenfassungDie Technologien Augmented Reality (AR) und Virtual Reality (VR), die mit dem Überbegriff Extended Reality (XR) zusammengefasst werden, beeinflussen die Möglichkeiten der Kommunikation und Kollaboration grundlegend. Sie können intuitiv als Schnittstelle diverser Informationsquellen genutzt werden und bieten neue Arten der Informationsdarstellung. Extended-Reality-Systeme (XRS) bauen auf diesen beiden Technologien, AR und VR, auf und haben großes Potenzial für ein breites Spektrum an Anwendungsfällen, insbesondere für Kollaborationen.Trotz dieses Potenzials ist bisher oft nicht klar, wann, wo und wie XRS sinnvoll eingesetzt werden können. Dies verzögert Innovationen und die Einführung in Arbeitsprozesse. Bei Entscheidern ist die Abgrenzung zwischen AR und VR teilweise unzureichend bekannt bzw. es fehlt die Terminologie, um die unterschiedlichen Systeme adäquat zu beschreiben. An dieser Stelle setzt diese konzeptuelle Arbeit an. Sie hat zum Ziel, das Verständnis der Anwendungsmöglichkeiten von XRS für Kollaborationen zu erleichtern sowie bei der Terminologie zu unterstützen. Aufbauend auf einer zentralen Taxonomie aus dem Bereich ‚Computer-Supported Cooperative Work‘ (CSCW) wird eine Kategorisierung von XRS für Kollaborationen entwickelt. Ein Vergleich mit bereits bestehenden Taxonomien zeigt die Notwendigkeit einer praktisch anwendbaren und unkompliziert handhabbaren Kategorisierung für die Praxis.Diese Arbeit trägt durch Kategorisierung, Terminologie und Illustrationen, zu einem besseren Verständnis von XRS-Einsatzmöglichkeiten bei. Dazu werden Illustrationen aus dem Umfeld von industriellen Baustellen genutzt.

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work – Revisited

Due to the COVID-19 lockdowns and the related mandated work for home, we have seen a massive increase of the use of collaboration tools in various work settings in the last 18 months. Whereas this might have been a new terrain for some, IT-supported work and the related research domain Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) have been around for decades. In this article we briefly review what CSCW has to offer for the currently increasing demand in setting up remote collaboration – and share our own observations about what happened when collaboration tools have been introduced in the pandemic. As a summary, we present some learnings from the experience – both for the current state of CSCW research and for future work.

Non-verbal Aspects of Collaboration in Virtual Worlds: a CSCW Taxonomy-development Proposal Integrating the Presence Dimension

Virtual worlds, particularly those able to provide a three-dimensional physical space, have features that make them suitable to support collaborative activities. These features distinguish virtual worlds from other collaboration tools, but current taxonomies of the field of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work do not account for several distinctive features of virtual worlds, namely those related with non-verbal communication. We intended to find out how the use of an avatar, gestures, spatial sounds, etc., influence collaboration in order to be able to include non-verbal communication in taxonomies of the field Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. Several cases of collaboration in virtual worlds are analysed, to find the impact of these non-verbal characteristics of virtual worlds. We proposed adding the concept of Presence to taxonomies of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and contribute with guidance for future taxonomy development that includes it as a new dimension. This new dimension of Presence is subdivided into "avatar" and "physical space" subdimensions. In turn, these are divided into "physical appearance", "gestures, sounds and animations" and "focus, nimbus and aura"; "environment" and "objects / artefacts". This new taxonomy-development proposal may contribute to inform better design of virtual worlds in support of cooperative work.