Alan T. Clark

ECSCW 2011 Dual Eye-Tracking Workshop (and CSCW 2012)

Alan Clark — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 21:12:06 +0000

Unfortunately I couldn’t make the trip, but my coauthor Darren Gergle presented our paper:

Clark, A.T & Gergle, D. “Mobile Dual Eye-Tracking Methods: Challenges and Opportunities” (2011). Paper presented at DUET 2011: Dual Eye Tracking workshop at ECSCW 2011 (Aarhus, Denmark. September 25, 2011.)

at the DUET 2011 workshop at ECSCW. If you couldn’t make it, but are interested, we hope to be presenting some related work at the dual eye-tracking workshop at CSCW 2012.

ICA 2011 & Bornhorst Fellowship

Alan Clark — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 02:33:51 +0000

I’m getting a head start on the whole absent-minded professor thing. I’ve completely dropped the ball on updating my page, even though a lot has happened in the past few months. I had a paper on organizational technology presented at ICA 2011 in Boston in May. I completed my qualifying exams. And I just got word that I received the Bornhorst Family Fellowship here at Northwestern!

CSCW 2011

Alan Clark — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 05:47:45 +0000

If you’re interested, I’ll be presenting my CSCW paper on Wednesday in the Shared Workspaces session. I will be talking about patterns of language use and reference for mobile vs. stationary conversational pairs. If that’s not enough, I can promise video and an amazing clipart-style .gif of a confused robot.

Hope to see you there!

About Me

Alan Clark — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 17:53:23 +0000

My name is Alan Clark. I’m a Ph.D. Student in the Media, Technology & Society program in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. I am advised by Dr. Darren Gergle. I am a member of the CollabLab.

Broadly speaking, I study collaboration and technology with a focus on the factors that support interpersonal coordination at both micro- and group-levels. I try to approach my research from a perspective combining Communication theory and HCI. Right now, I’m primarily working on two projects.

With my advisor Darren Gergle in the CollabLab and as part of my NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, I’m using a dual mobile eye-tracking system to study how gaze coordination, positioning, and other conversational dynamics affect and how they coordinate their attention and language use – specifically, how they refer to objects in their shared space. Importantly, we’ve found that the language use and gaze coordination of mobile pairs should is quite different than that of stationary/seated pairs, and that collaborative systems or AI that take language into account needs to treat these spatial interaction contexts differently. I’m currently working on ways to use real-time gaze towards objects in space (as opposed to on a computer screen) as a useful form of input in collaborative communication technology.

With my Northwestern colleagues William Barley and Paul Leonardi, I’m working on a project focusing on theory about why individuals adopting a new technology might adopt highly varied initial uses, and how communication processes can explain why initially divergent communication processes might converge toward common understanding and practices over time and repeated use. Going forward, I plan to do both field observations and “live lab” experiments to look at how communication processes that can lead to common technology practices are affected by the affordances and design of a newly introduced technology.

My other research interests include social dimensions and communicative uses of augmented reality, developing experimental methods for studying language and conversation in naturalistic interactions, and studying the role of shared visual contexts in communication.

Paper to appear at ICA 2011 in Boston

Alan Clark — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 21:57:56 +0000

My paper entitled “Emerging Technologies-in-Practice: A Communication Framework of Convergence of Technologies-in-Use” with William Barley and Paul Leonardi was accepted at ICA 2011. In the paper, we discuss how individuals’ particular ways of using technology can evolve into group practices. Importantly, we take a second look at existing theories about how this happens by paying closer attention to communicative processes and HCI.

We’ll be presenting the paper at the conference in Boston in late May.

CSCW 2011 best paper nomination

Alan Clark — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 21:24:24 +0000

My 2011 CSCW paper with Darren Gergle got a best paper nomination! Very grateful to the reviewers and ACs for the comments and their support of our work.

See you in Hangzhou.

Presenting at CSCW 2011

Alan Clark — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 06:09:52 +0000

I’ll be presenting a paper titled “See what I’m saying? Using dyadic mobile eye tracking to study collaborative reference”, coauthored with Darren Gergle, at the CSCW 2011 conference in Hangzhou, China. The paper discusses how patterns of gaze and referential language differ between stationary and mobile pairs, and how this information might be used to develop interfaces and collaborative systems that better understand human language in the wild.

More details to come when I have them!

Paper accepted at ST&D 2010

Alan Clark — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 23:08:30 +0000

My paper, “Effects of Shifting Spatial Context on Referential Form”, coauthored with Darren Gergle, was accepted to the ST&D 2010 conference (also known as the 20th Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse). In a nutshell, the paper reviews some work we did looking at how people in naturalistic (as opposed to tightly-controlled experimental) conversation use their movement and position as a conversational resource that allows them to use simpler referential language. Although I’m first author, Dr. Gergle will be giving the talk – I’ll be out of town getting married at the time. The conference is August 16-18 at the Palmer House hotel in Chicago, and it’s looking like a really strong program this year. Great stuff for anyone interested in getting a preview of great psycholinguistic / conversation research before it hits the journals.

CHI 2010

Alan Clark — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:07:44 +0000

Along with several of my CollabLab colleagues, I’ll be attending CHI 2010 in Atlanta.

NSF GRFP

Alan Clark — Wed, 20 May 2009 01:29:02 +0000

I was just awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship!