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Sara Kiesler
Hillman Professor of Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at
Carnegie Mellon University

Computing has come a long way since my 1990s studies with Lee Sproull and our students on computer networking. Our book, Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization (MIT Press), described the indirect, secondary effects of using email and newsgroups in organizations. Advances in computing and new online services since have made possible new kinds of collaboration, information exchange, and group work. My research continues to apply behavioral and social science research methods and theory to understand how groups, teams, and organizations collaborate, and the human factors dimensions of people's use of, and interactions with, technology.

Current projects

Organization Science of Science:

With Jonathon Cummings, I have studied scientific work in research groups and watched the shift to larger teams engaged in multidisciplinary and geographically-distributed research. Over nine years, we followed 549 research groups funded by the National Science Foundation. Our goal was to understand how the structure and interactions in these research groups led to differences in their productivity and creativity, and in their integration as teams. Some key publications in this work are:

• Cummings, J. N. & Kiesler, S. (2005). Collaborative Research Across Disciplinary and Organizational Boundaries. Social Studies of Science, 35(5), 703-722. doi: 10.1177/0306312705055535
• Cummings, J. N., & Kiesler, S. (2007). Coordination costs and project outcomes in multi-university collaborations. Research Policy, 36(10), 1620-1634. doi: 10.1016/j.respol.2007.09.001
• Balakrishnan, A. D., Kiesler, S., Cummings, J. N., & Zadeh, R. (2011). Research team integration: what it is and why it matters. In Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work, (CSCW '11) 523-532. doi: 10.1145/1958824.1958905
• Zadeh, R., Balakrishnan, A. D., Kiesler, S., Cummings, J. N., & (2011). What's in a move?: Normal disruption and a design challenge. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11), 2897-2906. doi: 10.1145/1978942.1979372
• Cummings, J. N., Kiesler, S., Zadeh, R., & Balakrishnan, A. (in press). Group heterogeneity increases the risks of large group size: A longitudinal study of research group productivity. Psychological Science.

Collaboration

With Susan Fussell and our students, we study the process of investigation as carried out by intelligence analysis and detectives. Their task is to look for clues in data and see patterns that lead to a solution. Some publications from this work:

• Balakrishnan, A. D., Kiesler, S., Kittur, A., & Fussell, S. Pitfalls of Information Access with Visualizations in Remote Collaborative Analysis. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '10). NY: ACM Press.
• Balakrishnan, A. D., Fussell, S., & Kiesler, S. (2008). Do visualizations improve synchronous remote collaboration? In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'08). NY:ACM Press.
• Scupelli, P., Fussell, S. R., Kiesler, S. (2010). Architecture and information technology as factors in surgical suite information sharing and coordination. In Proceedings of the first ACM Conference on Health Informatics (IHI'10). NY: ACM Press.
• Scupelli, P., Xiao, Y., Fussell, S. R., Kiesler, S., & Gross, M. (2010). Supporting coordination in surgical suites: Physical aspects of common information spaces. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'10). NY: ACM Press.

The Project on People and Robots

This project has evolved and now is about human-robot interaction within a service delivery framework. In addition to the publications below related to this work, I am also the editor of a new journal, the Journal of Human-Robot Interaction (JHRI).

• Lee, M. K., Kiesler, S., & Forlizzi, J. (2012). Ripple effects of an embedded social agent: A field study of a social robot in the workplace. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '12). NY: ACM Press.
• Lee, M. K., Forlizzi, J., Kiesler, S., Rybski, P., Antanitis, J., Savetsila, P. (2012). Personalization in HRI: A longitudinal field experiment. Proceedings of the Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI '12). NY: ACM Press.
• Lee, M.K., Kiesler, S., and Forlizzi, J. (2011). Mining behavioral economics to design persuasive technology for healthy choices. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11). NY: ACM Press.
• Lee, M.K., Kiesler, S., Forlizzi, J., Srinivasa, S., & Rybski, P. (2010). Gracefully mitigating breakdowns in robotic services. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction (HRI '10) Best paper award
• Lee, M.K., Kiesler, S., Forlizzi, J. (2010). Receptionist or information kiosk: How do people talk with a robot? In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW '10). NY: ACM Press.
• Lee, M.K., Forlizzi, J., Rybski, P.E., Crabbe, F., Chung, W., Finkle, J., Glaser, E., and Kiesler, S. (2009). The Snackbot: Documenting the design of a robot for long-term human-robot interaction. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human robot interaction (HRI '09). NY: ACM Press.
• Li, I., Forlizzi, J., Dey, A., & Kiesler, S. (2007). My agent as myself or another: effects on credibility and listening to advice. In Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Designing pleasurable products and interfaces (DPPI '07). NY: ACM Press.
• Torrey, C., Powers, A., Kiesler, S., Fussell, S. (2007). Exploring adaptive dialogue based on a robot’s awareness of human gaze and task progress. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction (HRI '07). NY: ACM Press.
• Mutlu, B., Osman, S., Forlizzi, J., Hodgins, J., & Kiesler, S. (2006). Perceptions of ASIMO: an exploration on co-operation and competition with humans and humanoid robots. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCHI/SIGART conference on Human-robot interaction (HRI '06). See also from authors: Task structure and user attributes as elements of human-robot interaction design. RO-MAN 2006, the 15th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, United Kingdom.
• Torrey, C. Powers, A., Marge, M., Fussell, S., & Kiesler, S. (2006). Effects of adaptive robot dialogue on information exchange and social relations. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCHI/SIGART conference on Human-robot interaction (HRI '06). NY: ACM Press.
• Powers, A., & Kiesler, S. (2006). The advisor robot: Tracing people’s mental model from a robot’s physical attributes. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCHI/SIGART conference on Human-robot interaction (HRI '06). NY: ACM Press.
• Powers, A., Kramer, A., Lim, S., Kuo, J., Lee, S-L., Kiesler, S. (2005). Common ground in dialogue with a gendered humanoid robot. In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on Robot and Human Interaction (ICRA '05).
• Kiesler, S. (2005). Fostering common ground in human-robot interaction. RO-MAN 2005, the 14th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, Nashville, TN.
• Powers, A., Kramer, A. D. I., Lim, S., Kuo, J., Lee, S-L., Kiesler, S. (2005). Eliciting information from people with a gendered humanoid robot. RO-MAN 2005, the 14th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, Nashville, TN.

User Perspectives on a New Internet

I am working with colleagues and students in the HCII on the exciting eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA) project at Carnegie Mellon, whose purpose is to develop a new Internet architecture. Our work is to provide “early warning” signals of how a new Internet architecture might affect ordinary people, for good or bad. Our first contributions are to point to the increasing social transparency of the Internet (read “Social Transparency in Networked Information Exchange: A Framework and Research Question”), and to the myriad of reasons why users may want anonymity (which could be impeded in a new Internet). We have a new NSF grant to study anonymity online. Some publications from this work:

• Stuart, H.C., Dabbish, L., Kiesler, S., Kinnaird, P., Kang, R. (2012). Social transparency in networked information exchange: A theoretical framework. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '12). NY:ACM Press.
• Kang, R., Brown, S., & Kiesler, S. (2013) (in press). Why do people seek anonymity on the Internet? Informing policy and design. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13). NY: ACM Press.
• Kinnaird, P., Dabbish, L., Kiesler, S., & Faste, H. (2013) (in press). Co-worker transparency in a microtask marketplace. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '13). NY:ACM Press.
• Kinnaird, P., Dabbish, L., and Kiesler, S. (2012) (in press). The impact of a transparent workflow in Mechanical Turk. In Proceeding of the 17th ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP '12). NY: ACM Press.

Google Scholar citation page

View my Google Scholar citation page, which provides a one-page list of my scholarly articles, books, abstracts, etc.