[Air-L] Call For Participation: CHI 2018 Workshop "Sensemaking in a Senseless World"

[Elizabeth Anne Watkins]

*CHI 2018 Workshop: "Sensemaking in a Senseless World" **- Call For
Participation *

We are seeking workshop papers on topics in the area of sensemaking for a
workshop to be held at CHI 2018 in Montreal, Canada.

Making sense of information is central to HCI as people look to understand
complex systems, domains and problems. Broadly, we take the topic of
sensemaking to mean understanding of how people collect and organize
information for analysis and synthesis, and the tools and processes they
follow when doing this.

Sensemaking, per se, is everywhere in the systems we build and in the
domains we study. Whenever people need to function well with data, making
sense of the information is often a central task.

We are interested in both individual and group sensemaking practices—from
how one person figures out a complex data set, up to large, collaborative
group sensemaking where teams of people assemble and interpret large,
complex, interlocking sets of data. Representative tasks include: the
practices of people who deal with sensemaking hand-offs (e.g., in a medical
setting) or in analytical areas (e.g., making sense of financial data for
forensic purposes); data set interpretation; understanding large
collections of documents; etc.

In particular, what are the tools, techniques and best practices of people
who need to make sense of a large amount of complex information? What
issues of scale, complexity and coordination arise that are particular to
making sense of a complex world?

*Workshop date:  *Saturday, April 21, 2018  (Montreal, Canada) at the CHI
conference (https://chi2018.acm.org/)

*Workshop Goals*
The workshop will include research in areas such as:

   - how do people make sense of complex sets of information? (behavior
   studies and tool use) • issues of representation creation, evolution and
   use over time
   - implicit and explicit aspects of sensemaking
   - group sensemaking: including different levels of social aggregation,
   from individual, to group, to large social contexts
   - both static and evolving problem environments
   - how sensemaking fits into other knowledge work (information gathering,
   decision making)
   - what is sensemaking today? (In particular, what other sensemaking
   schools of thought are there, and how can we mutually inform each others
   work?)

>From this meeting of the minds, the Sensemaking workshop has several
desired outcomes:

   - First, we will create working relationships between researchers whose
   work focuses on aspects of sensemaking. While we certainly hope to bring
   together those working within the HCI community, we would like to try to
   bring in some researchers from other disciplines as well, including Library
   & Information Science (LIS) and Organizational Theory and Psychology (e.g.,
   cognitive/problem solving research).

   - Our second outcome is to enrich our understanding of sensemaking
   activities. This includes striving for a shared understanding of the
   different notions of sensemaking, laying out and structuring the space of
   varieties of sensemaking (e.g., different levels of social aggregation,
   static vs. dynamic contexts), articulating their commonalities and
   differences.

   - Our third goal is to draw from this is a greater understanding of
   design implications for improved sensemaking tools, systems and designs.
   There is a clearly emerging demand for tools for verifiability and
   trustability of facts shared on public media channels. For example, a new
   generation of tools is emerging to allow journalists to spot inaccurate or
   fake news by leveraging ML algorithms and visualizations. Can we take
   advantage of these tools in our everyday sensemaking tasks as well?

*Organizers*

   - Daniel Russell has been working in the area of sensemaking since the
   early 1990s. His publication of The cost structure of sensemaking in 1993
   led to a stream of research in this area. Now a Senior Research Scientist
   at Google, he primarily studies how people formulate information needs and
   satisfy them with online research tools and databases. He has run three
   earlier CHI workshops on sensemaking, one of which led to a special edition
   publication of the journal Computer-Human Interaction.

   - Gregorio Covertino is a Sr. UX Manager and UX Researcher at Cloudera.
   He has been working on collaborative visualizations for sensemaking since
   2003 with his PhD work on multi-role emergency management teams. In
   addition, he has worked on bias and visualizations for intelligence
   analysis teams at Xerox PARC. At Informatica and Cloudera, his most recent
   research work has focused on self-service analytics tools for business
   users, big data tools for data scientists, and log analytics tools.

   - Niki Kittur is an Associate Professor and Cooper-Siegel Chair in the
   Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His
   research explores a future that scales sensemaking beyond the limits of a
   single individual’s mind by: 1) distributing sensemaking among many people
   and machines; 2) enabling people to build on the sensemaking that others
   have already done; and 3) seamlessly integrating human and machine
   cognition to make sense of large information spaces. He is also a
   co-founder of DataSquid, a startup that supports sensemaking by bringing
   the power of intuitive touch and physics to data visualization.

   - Peter Pirolli has been a long-time contributor to the sensemaking
   literature, establishing his contributions to this area with the seminal
   book Information Foraging Theory (2007). His research involves a mix of
   cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction,
   with applications in digital health, sensemaking, and information foraging.

   - Elizabeth Anne Watkins primarily studies news-producing organizations.
   News organizations combine the technical and complexity issues typical of
   bureaucratic systems with the creative, autonomous decision-making of
   journalists. As more industries face changing labor models, shifting to
   remote workers and building more of their computing needs on third-party
   platforms, journalists can serve as a critical early-warning population, a
   canary- in-the-coal-mine look at the management of cybersecurity in the
   future of work. For us, sensemaking provides a framework to study how
   journalists who work in these organizations “make sense” of cybersecurity.

*To submit a workshop paper:  *

If you are interested in submitting or attending the workshop, you can find
more details on the workshop website: https://sensemakingworkshop2018.com
<https://sensemakingchi2018.com/>  For inquiries, please email:
dmrussell+sensemaking2081 at gmail.com

*Deadlines: * The deadline for submitted workshop papers is March 2, 2018.
Notification of acceptance will be March 30, 2018.