Paper Reading #1:Learning how to feel again: towards affective workplace presence and communication technologies

Intro:

• Title: Learning how to feel again: towards affective workplace presence and communication technologies
• Reference Information: Illonios Unviersity

• Author Bios: All authors are students who studying computer science at Illonioous Unveristy. For Xu, his research interest is  to Creativity Support Tools, Crowdsourcing and Visualization.

Summary: In this paper, they talk about how people are lack of each other's cue of affect in today's live. 

This is mainly because everyone in work place communicate via computer-mediated channels. They insist that affect is very important to communication and collaboration in the work place. In their work, they try to capture people's affect state during work time without any invasive way. They ask a group of workers to work together in a building. The workers know each other very well and they use myUnity to communicate. During the day, they will sent out text messages and email five to eight times. At each time period, participants were asked to report their location, current communication media preferences , preferences with respect to requests from colleagues , current affective state (Figure 1c), and, optionally, their estimate of another colleague’s affective state. As a result, the participates rarely felt confident to guess others affective state(26% of the time) and when they guessed, the number is 57%for pleasure and 59.1% for arousal. From the information shown above, participates have difficulty for assess affective state of others.

Related work not referenced in the paper: 

1. Virtual teams: Technology and the workplace of the future
2. Informal workplace communication: What is it like and how might we support it?
3. Introducing instant messaging and chat in the workplace
4. Health Communication on the Internet: An effective channel for health behavior change?
5. Assessing social presence in asynchronous text-based computer
6. Interactivity and vividness effects on social presence and involvement with a web-based advertisement
7. Interaction and outeraction: instant messaging in action
8. Monitoring online communication: can the development of convergence and social presence indicate an interactive learning environment?
9. Perceptions of mediated presence in an asynchronous online course: Interplay of communicationbehaviors and medium
10. How to compete: the impact of workplace practices and information technology on    productivity

I think the work I read is about novel. Since this problem appear these past decade, I think the topic is novel. And they did talk about related work, such as myUnity. They also mention some other early project about this topic, such as Active Badge System which provide awareness of people's physical environment through video feed.

Evaluation: They use qualitative measures and biased measures. The method does work and they measure only part of the system. Since they only did one study and it's only done with 23 people.

Discussion: I think the methods they used is good in terms of non invasive way. Their contribution is not that big since the result of study is obvious to most people. However, this is only the initial step of their approach. in the paper, they stated there will be more studies and improvement in the future.