Scott Klemmer : 2012 Mobile and Social Workshop

From the local grocery store to high-stakes environments like operating rooms, task lists encourage best practices, augment memory, and prevent skipped steps. However, checklists lose value when entries are vague, outdated, or disconnected from knowledge workers' primary tools. This talk describes two efforts to make task lists more powerful by making them more collaborative. First, we will show how a crowd-powered task list can break thorny, lingering tasks into actionable steps -- and that people who receive crowd-created plans complete more items on their checklist than those who don't. To enable action plans to scale, I'll discuss a machine learning approach for automatically selecting an action plan for reuse. It's especially valuable to automatically provide action plans for mobile devices, when input is limited. I'll also introduce our initial efforts on enabling task-centric email via an email 'valet key'. Second, we'll describe our research in collaboration with the medical school showing how checklists spanning large displays and mobile devices can help medical teams in the operating room. Turning checklists into a social coordination tool -- and integrating them with timeline and resource information -- facilitates common ground and helps teams make effective decisions more efficiently.

Scott Klemmer is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He co-directs the Human-Computer Interaction Group and holds the Bredt Faculty Scholar development chair. Organizations around the world use his lab's open-source design tools and curricula; several books and popular press articles have covered his research and teaching. He has been awarded the Katayanagi Emerging Leadership Prize, Sloan Fellowship, NSF CAREER award, Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship, and several best paper awards at the premier HCI conferences (CHI and UIST). His former PhD students are leaders at top universities, research organizations, in Silicon Valley, and social entrepeneurship. He has a dual BA in Art-Semiotics and Computer Science from Brown University, Graphic Design work at RISD, and an MS and PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. He was the program co-chair of UIST 2011. He is teaching a free, online HCI class.