 |
Sharoda
A. Paul
Ph.D. Candidate
College of Information Sciences
and Technology
The Pennsylvania State University, University Park.
Office: 323 IST Building
email: spaul (at) ist (dot) psu (dot) edu |
About
me
I am
a fourth year Ph.D.candidate at the College
of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University. I am a research
assistant for my advisor Madhu Reddy in the Socio-Technical
Systems Lab.
I am a computer scientist interested in studying how
people use computers to collaborate. More specifically, I am interested
in studying
how groups use computers for collaborative information seeking, search,
and sensemaking. For my dissertation, I am studying the process of
collaborative sensemaking among groups of healthcare providers in the
emergency department. I have been working on multiple research projects
at the Department
of Emergency Medicine at the Penn
State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center (HMC), a
500-bed
teaching hospital associated with Penn State University. My research
interests broadly lie in the fields of
computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), human-computer interaction
(HCI), medical informatics, social computing, information science, and
intelligent agents.
I grew up in the 'Steel City' of Jamshedpur, India.
I attended Sacred
Heart School and Loyola
School and completed my Bachelors in Computer Science
and Engineering at Birla
Institute of Technology, MESRA.
The past three years of graduate school have been a
great learning experience.
Taking up a PhD in information sciences, instead of computer science,
has opened up
my mind to studies in many fields that I had not encountered in my
computer science education. From the diverse mix of courses at IST, I
developed a special interest in the philosophy
of science and enjoyed reading Kuhn
and Lakatos.
I have been fortunate to have found wonderful colleagues and friends at
IST.
In my spare time, I enjoy roller
skating, running, cooking,
and the theater.
I also love driving my Ford Focus
*News* 4/2008
This summer I will be interning at Microsoft Research in the Adaptive Systems and
Interaction group at Redmond, WA. I will be working on interfaces
for collaborative search and sensemaking.
*News* 1/2008
Work-in-progress accepted to CHI 2008,
Apr 5th-10th, 2008, Florence, Italy.
*News* 1/2008
Poster accepted and Doctoral Consortium awarded for the iConference '08 to
be held at UCLA, 28th Feb - 1st Mar, 2008.
*News* 12/2007
Position paper accepted to the CHI
2008 workshop on Sensemaking
being organized by Dan Russell, Peter Pirolli, Stu Card, Mark
Stefik, and George Furnas. Apr 5th - 10th, 2008, Florence, Italy.
*News* 07/2007
Poster on Collaborative Sensemaking accepted to GROUP
2007, ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work. Nov 4th - 7th,
Sanibel Is, FL.
Research
Understanding
and supporting collaborative sensemaking
I am fascinated by how people make sense of the situations they
encounter, of the large amounts of information they process in their
personal and professional lives, and of their social interactions.
Often, this process of sensemaking
(Weick, 1995; Russell, 1993) requires pooling of information from
various sources and media, as well as collaboration with others.
Specifically in the context of collaborative work, sensemaking is a
complex process where the sensemaker's understanding of a situation is
generated via interaction with others, maintaining awareness of the
situation (situation awareness) and of other's activities (activity
awareness), and via various socio-cognitive processes (participatory
cognition). Collaborative sensemaking
plays an important role in everyday work as well as in crisis
situations and I am interested in examining how technology can be
designed to support this process. I am answering the following
question in my dissertation:
"How can we support sensemaking
in co-located groups engaged in information-intensive collaborative
tasks?"
While sensemaking has been
discussed at the individual level in the field of human-computer
interaction (HCI), information science, and education and at the
organizational level in the field of
organizational science, there is little understanding of sensemaking at
the group or team level, especially in the
context of
time-critical work. Drawing on literature in
computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), HCI,
organizational science, learning sciences and information sciences, I
explore the nature of "collaborative sensemaking" and how technology
can support sensemaking in collaborative work.
I have been
conducting an ethnographic study of the sensemaking activities of
healthcare providers at the Department of
Emergency Medicine in the Hershey Medical Center since Jan 2007.
The
emergency department is an ideal environment to study collaborative
sensemaking. A challenging aspect of the work of doctors, nurses, and
other clinical and non-clinical staff is
making sense of dynamic and unfamiliar situations using an array of
information
sources and working towards a shared goal. In my data collection I have
been specifically focussing on
the triggers of collaborative
sensemaking, the challenges to
the process, and the aids
used.
The ultimate goal is to inform the design of tools that can enhance
collaborative sensemaking in groups.
Publications
Peer-reviewed
Paul, S.A., Reddy,
M., and deFlitch, C.J. (Under review). A Systematic
Review
of Simulation Research Investigating Emergency Department Overcrowding. Submitted to The Journal of the
American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA).
Reddy, M., Paul, S.A.,
Abraham, J. (Under review). Challenges to Effective Crisis Management:
Using Information and Communication Tools to Coordinate Emergency
Medical Services and Emergency Department Teams.
Paul, S.A., Reddy, M., and
deFlitch, C.J. (2008). Information
and Communication Tools as Aids to Collaborative Sensemaking. In
Proceedings of Conference on Human
Factors in Computing
Systems (CHI 2008) Extended Abstracts, Florence, Italy.
Paul, S.A., Reddy,
M., and deFlitch, C.J. (2008). Collaborative Sensemaking: A
Field-study
in an Emergency Department. Position paper presented at the Sensemaking workshop at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy.
Paul, S.A. (2008).
Supporting Collaborative Sensemaking in the
Emergency Department. Poster
presented at the Third Annual
iConference 2008, Los Angeles, CA.
Paul, S.A., Reddy,
M.,
and Abraham, J. (2007) Collaborative Sensemaking during Emergency
Crisis
Response: How do ICTs Help? Poster presented at the Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGGROUP
Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP 2007), Sanibel
Island, FL.
Zhu, S., Abraham, J., Paul, S.A., Reddy, M., Yen,
J., Pfaff, M., and deFlitch, C.J. (2007). R-CAST-MED: Applying
Intelligent
Agents to Support Emergency Medical Decision Making Teams. Proceedings
of the 11th Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Conference
(AIME 2007), Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Purao, S., Paul S.A.,
and Smith, S. (2007). Understanding Enterprise
Integration Project Risks: A Focus Group Study. Proceedings
of the 18th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems
Applications (DEXA 2007), p. 850-854,
Regensburg,
Germany.
Zhu, S., Abraham, J., Paul,
S.A.,
Reddy,
M., Yen, J., Pfaff, M., and deFlitch, C.J. (2007). R-CAST-MED: Applying
Intelligent Agents to Support Emergency Medical Decision Making Teams.
Poster presented at Second North East Student
Colloquium on Artificial Intelligence (NESCAI 2007), Ithaca,
NY.
Non-peer
reviewed
Paul,
S.A. (2007) Emergency Response Information
Systems: Emerging Trends and Technologies. American Medical Informatics
Association Student Working Group News, 4(3), 4-6. Available at http://www.amia.org/mbrcenter/wg/st/news.asp.
(July 2007)
Paul,
S.A.
(2007). The ER Monologues: Automated Discovery of Patient Flows
from
Emergency Department Data. 2nd Annual IST
Graduate Symposium: Communities Managing Knowledge, Pennsylvania
State University,
State College, PA.
Umapathy, K., Paul, S.A., Purao, S., Bagby,
J.W.,
and Mitra, P. (In press) Avatars of Participants in Anticipatory
Standardization Processes. [Forthcoming] in Standards Edge 2006:
Standardization: Unifier or Divider? Bolin group.
Mitra, P., Purao, S., Bagby J.W., Umapathy, K., and Paul,
S.A.
(2005).
An Empirical Analysis of Development Processes for Anticipatory
Standards, NET
Institute Working Paper No. 05-18. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=850524
Presentations
Paul, S.A.
(2008). The Role of Information and Communication Technologies in
Alleviating Emergency
Department Overcrowding. Connections
2007 Doctoral
Consortium held at Drexel University, Philadelphia,
PA.
Paul, S.A.
(2007). Healthcare Information: Supporting Collaborative Sensemaking in
the Emergency Department. The Third
Annual iConference 2008 Doctoral
Consortium held at UCLA, Los Angeles,
CA.
Current
Projects
R-CAST-MED:
Using R-CAST to Support
Emergency Medical Decision-Making (May 2006 - present)
The goal of this research is to enable the R-CAST agent-based
architecture to be employed on mobile devices that can be used by
emergency medical services (EMS) and emergency department (ED) teams to
take decisions during crisis response. I developed a focus group
scenario of a train derailment involving HAZMATs. We used this scenario
to guide focus groups with ED and EMS personnel at Hershey Medical
Center to understand their information and communication needs and how
R-CAST can support those needs. We are working on simulating our
fieldwork scenario on the R-CAST platform via the NEOCITIES interface.
Collaborators:
Dr Madhu Reddy, Dr Mike
McNeese (MINDS lab), Dr John Yen (Intelligent Agents lab), Dr
Chris deFlitch (Director and Vice Chair of the Department of
Emergency Medicine at HMC), Shizhuo Zhu, Joanna Abraham, Mark Pfaff.
Healthcare
Engineering: Penn State Partnership to Transform Hospital Emergency
Care (Jan 2007 - present)
The goal of this inter-department and inter-organization project is to
apply systems theories and methods (process flow analysis, queuing,
simulation, capacity planning etc.) to emergency department care
processes and to implement information technology solutions to improve
quality and timeliness of patient care. As a first step, my role is to
model patient and information flows within the ED with the objective of
understanding how to eliminate waste in care processes. I am currently
conducting ethnographic observations and interviews in the ED at HMC.
Collborators:
Dr
Chris deFlitch (Director and Vice Chair of the Department of
Emergency Medicine at HMC), Dr
Deb Medeiros and Dr
Cathy Harmonosky (Associate Professors, Industrial
and Manufacturing Dept., Penn State), Dr Madhu Reddy (Assistant
Professor, College of IST, Penn State).
Past Projects
Alleviating
Overcrowding in Hospital Emergency Departments: A Modeling and
Simulation Approach (Jan - Apr 2006)
As an independent study with Dr Sandeep Purao, I conducted a review of
computer science and healthcare literature from 1970-2005 to understand
how modeling and simulation techniques have been used to reduce effects
(such as long patient wait times, long length of stay etc.) of
overcrowding in EDs.
Collaborators:
Dr Sandeep Purao
An Empirical Analysis
of Development Processes for Anticipatory ICT Standards (Jun 2005 - Jan
2006)
This inter-disciplinary project examined the development process of Web
Services standards of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), focusing on
what role different players and stakeholders (Eg: small vs. large
companies) play in the process. My role was to perform content analysis
of the transcripts of meetings conducted at the W3C for development of
the SOAP standard. I also learnt to use the qualitative analysis
software ATLAS.ti.
Collborators:
Dr Prasenjit
Mitra, Dr Sandeep Purao, John
Bagby (Institute of Information Policy), Karthikeyan Umapathy.
ICTs in Real Estate:
Industry Change in Local Markets (Sep - Dec 2005)
I was a research assistant for this project whose goal was to examine
how adoption and use of information and communication technologies
(ICTs) has impacted local real estate markets. I conducted telephone
interviews with real estate agents across the country which fed into a
cross-country statistical analysis of ICT adoption trends.
Collaborators:
Dr Steve Sawyer
(Center
for Information Society), Jesse Hedge (Hohenstein).
Identifying Risks and
Resolution Strategies for Organizational Systems Integration
Projects (May - Dec 2005)
One of my basic research interests is to understand the process of
implementation of large-scale, complex information systems in
organizations. This project looked at organizational actors'
perceptions of risks in the implementation of a systems integration
project and what risks resulution strategies were used within the
organization to mitigate these risks. This was my first experience with
qualitative research methods and I helped conduct focus groups at Accuweather.com offices in State
College, PA.
Collaborators: Dr
Sandeep Purao, Steve Smith (Accuweather.com).
Teaching
Instructor for WISE
Camp 2007: Information Technology as a Gateway to the
World (June 2007 - present)
I co-taught a cross-cultural project to high school girls,
along with
my colleague Joey Lee, as part of the Women in Sciences and
Engineering Camp this summer. The goal of the camp is to encourage
women to take up technology careers and as part of our project we had
the students in the camp collaborate with 11th grade students
ar DBMS High School in India. We were apprehensive about how this
would work out because of the time difference and limited access to the
Internet in India, but the project was a success and I really enjoyed
the experience. Thanks to Sameer Honwad for travelling to India, to
my mom and Mrs. Rajani Shekhar, the principal of DBMS High School for
making this work. Check out the wiki with pictures and
links
to the students' blogs.
Collaborators: Joey J. Lee, Sameer
Honwad, and Dr Chris Hoadley
(dolcelab), Mrs Manju Paul and Mrs Rajani Shekhar (DBMS High School,
India), and the WISE
Institute at Penn State.
Teaching Assistant
As a TA, I have had the opportunity to collaborate with and learn
from faculty members who are highly accomplished in research and
teaching. My responsibilities have included grading assignments and
projects, presenting
special topics and conducting reviews, and managing course material on ANGEL
(Penn State's course management system). I have been a TA for -
IST 301:
Information and Organizations - Fall 2007 (Dr Madhu Reddy)
IST 331:
Organization and Design of Information Systems - User and System
Principles - Spring 2007 (Dr Christopher Hoadley)
IST 440W: IST
Integration - Fall 2006 (Dr. John Harwood)
IST 311:
Object-Oriented Design and Software Applications - Spring 2006 (Dr
Steven Haynes)
IST
240: Introduction to Computer Languages - Fall
2004, Spring 2005 (Dr.
Tracy Mullen
and Dr. Fred
Fonseca)
Course Work
Fall 2007
IST 525: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Auditing) with
Mary Beth Rosson
IST 600: PhD Research with Dr Madhu Reddy
Fall
2006
STAT 501: Regression Methods
IST 600: PhD Research with Dr Madhu Reddy
Spring
2006
IST 541: Qualitative Research in IST
IST 597C: Introduction to Medical Informatics
IST 590: Colloquium in IST
IST 596: Individual studies with Dr Sandeep Purao
Fall
2005
IST 594 Philosophy of Science
IE 597G: Human-in-the-loop simulation
IST 590: Colloquium in IST
IST 596: Individual studies with Dr Sandeep Purao
Spring
2005
IST
521:Human-Computer Interaction - The User and Technology
IST 597D: Intelligent Agent Technology and Applications
IST 597C: Researching Information Systems in Organizations (now
Organizational Informatics)
IST 590: Colloquium in IST
Fall
2004
IST 501: Integrative theories and Methods in Information Sciences and
Technology
IST 511: Information Management
IST 602: Supervised Experience in College Teaching
STAT 500: Applied Statistics
IST 590: Colloquim in IST
Links
Popular media
Google
and Microsoft look to change healthcare from the New York Times,
Aug 2007
Code Blue
for the ER: "We're at Our Breaking Point" from Newsweek, May 2007
Research labs/venues
Sensemaking
research at Xerox
PARC (Palo Alto Research Center)
Sensemaking
workshop at CHI 2008
The Sensemaking
Interdisciplinary Forum at the Ross School of Business at UMich,
Ann Arbor.
The Sense-making
Methodology website authored by Brenda Derwin at Ohio State
University
The Cognitive Technologies
Laboratory at the University of Chicago
Last updated: Mar
2008.
Copyright © Sharoda A. Paul, 2008
Hits since July 2007