Coordinating Expert Flash Teams on the Biological Internet of Things

From The Theme
POTENTIAL, PERFORMANCE AND PRODUCTIVITY

WHAT IF
What if we could enable remote team workers to leverage the Internet of Things for collaboration?

Flash Teams IoT Image

WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO
This project set out to improve our understanding of coordination and collaboration in geographically distributed project teams with a specific focus on the requirements for executing complex, open-ended projects using cloud-based hardware resources. Towards that end, we developed and tested an online platform that enables rapidly assembled, distributed teams to manipulate objects remotely and conduct complex, open ended research and project work.

WHAT WE FOUND
The research and collaboration tools developed for this project proved usable for remote users, with a positive response from participants. Researchers developed an online system for collaboration, enabling users to embed text, video and analysis, and share information on task procedure and methods. The system was tested in three phases, with increasing levels of autonomy in team and task selection, as well as coordination. Feedback from all three development and usability testing phases offered various UI design insights and enabled researchers to develop a useful platform for distributed collaboration and research. This platform continues to be tested and refined, as new teams of scientists participate in collaborative projects.

LEARN MORE
Valentine, V., Retelny, D., To, A., Rahmati, N., Doshi, T., Bernstein, M. “Flash Organizations: Crowdsouring Complex Work by Structuring Crowds As Organizations” CHI ’17 Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Pages 3523-3537
DOI:

Hossain, Z., Bumbacher, E. W., Chung, A. M., Kim, H., Litton, C., Walter, A. D., Pradhan, S. N., Jona, K., Blikstein, P., and Riedel-Kruse, I. H. “Interactive and scalable biology cloud experimentation for scientific inquiry and education” Nature Biotechnology 2016; 34 (12): 1293-1298

PEOPLE BEHIND THE PROJECT
Ingmar Riedel-KruseIngmar Riedel-Kruse is Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Dr. Riedel-Kruse’s research program is built upon a uniquely interdisciplinary approach that bridges domains as diverse as cell motility, genetic engineering, modeling and analytics, microfluidics, embedded systems, cloud lab architectures, computer science, (biotic) game design, and education. His team’s long-term goal is that biotechnological equipment becomes as interactive, user friendly, and ubiquitously used as their electronic counterparts.

Michael BernsteinMichael Bernstein is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. His research focuses on the design of crowdsourcing and social computing systems. This work has received five Best Paper awards and eleven honorable mentions at premier venues in human-computer interaction and social computing. Michael has been recognized as a Robert N. Noyce Family Faculty Scholar, and awarded the George M. Sprowls award, NSF CAREER Award, and Sloan Fellowship.