The Doctoral Colloquium at CSCW'98 is an invitation-only forum in which Ph.D. students meet and discuss their work with each other and a panel of experienced CSCW researchers and practitioners. Ten participants were accepted from the disciplines that form CSCW, including computer science, cognitive science, sociology, etc. The abstracts of their work appear below. During the Colloquium, participants give a short informal presentation of their work, followed by an open discussion of their work.
Students welcome interest in their work.
To contact Colloqium participants, please use the email addresses provided below. U.K. Proximity is arguably the most basic form of non-verbal communication and is known to affect the way that an interaction occurs, influencing factors such as dialogue, persuasion, trust and length of an interaction. To investigate the possible effects of a stranger appearing close or far away, an experiment was devised simulating a financial advice transaction using a multimedia banking kiosk, where the financial advisor appeared either very close or far away. The experiment showed that when the financial advisor appeared very close, interactions were longer, with the customer saying more, making more interruptions, and having more turns than if the advisor appeared far away. While this research indicates that perceived proximity may indeed have behavioral implications for interacting across a video link, future research aims to investigate further the precise nature both of the consequences and the reasons behind them.