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Seminar: Microsoft Live, Software, and Studios (9/12/2008)
UH Manoa's ICS and Speech Receive NSF Grant for study of Virtual Organizations
The National Science Foundation's VOSS program (Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems, Office of Cyberinfrastructure) awarded a grant of $382,421 to Dan Suthers (Principal Investigator, Dept. of ICS) and Devan Rosen (Co-Principal Investigator, Dept. of Speech) for a project titled "Traces--Understanding Distributed Socio-Technical Systems". The grant begins on November 1, 2009 and runs for a period of three years.
Communication and information technologies are rapidly becoming integral to daily life around the globe, enabling new forms of social systems and extending the scope of existing ones across time and space. These socio-technical systems range from informal networks of people to virtual organizations. To more effectively support virtual organizations with emerging technologies, new analytic tools are needed to understand how technological designs encourage transformative interactions between people. This project will develop a three-layered solution, the Traces framework, which consists of a theoretical foundation for analysis, a data model, and software tools to trace out the movements, confluences, and transformations of people and ideas in online social networks. This project will focus on online social networks that support the professional development of PhD students and of K-12 educators. Thus, the results of this research will enhance the infrastructure for virtual learning organizations.
The work will be based in the Laboratory for Interactive Learning Technologies. The National Science Foundation's award information for this grant may be found at http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0943147.
