Teamwork is a core human activity, essential to progress in many areas. A vast body of research in the social sciences and in computer science has studied teamwork and developed tools to support teamwork. Although the technologies resulting from this work have enabled teams to work together more effectively in many settings, they have proved inadequate for supporting the coordination of distributed teams that operate in a loosely-coupled manner. In this talk, I will present three integrated research efforts towards developing intelligent systems that reduce coordination overhead in such teams: an in depth formative study of complex healthcare teams, the design of new computational methods for personalizing the information shared with team members about collaborators' activities, and an evaluation of those methods in a realistic teamwork setting, demonstrating that personalized information sharing resulted in higher productivity and lower perceived workload of team members.
Ofra Amir completed her PhD at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She holds a BSc and MSc in Information Systems Engineering, both from Ben-Gurion University. Ofra’s research combines AI and HCI methods to develop intelligent systems that support people in domains such as education and healthcare. She is a recipient of a Siebel Scholarship.