Abstract. Real-time collaborative editing systems such as Google Drive are increasingly common. However, no prior work questioned the maximum acceptable delay for real-time collaboration or the efficacy of compensatory strategies. In this study we examine the performance consequences of simulated network delay on an artificial collaborative document editing task with a time constant and metrics for process and outcome suitable for experimental study. Results suggest that strategy influences task outcome at least as much as delay in the distribution of work in progress. However, a paradoxical interaction between delay and strategy emerged, in which the more generally effective, but highly coupled strategy was also more sensitive to delay.

Previously, spoken uncertainty has been analyzed using either lexical or acoustic features, but few, if any, studies have used both feature types in combination. Therefore, it is unknown to what extent these feature types provide redundant information. Additionally, prior research has focused on the study of acoustical features of only single words, and it is unclear if those results can generalize to perceived uncertainty in spontaneous speech. The current study elicited spontaneous speech through a team dialogue task in which two people worked together to locate street-level pictures of different houses on an overhead map. The communications were recorded, transcribed, broken into utterances, and presented to 10 individuals who rated each utterance on a 5-pt Likert scale from 1 (very uncertain) to 5 (very certain). A large number of acoustic and lexical features from the literature were calculated for each utterance. Random forest classification (Breiman, 2001) was used to select features and then investigate feature importance individually and also at the aggregate level of feature type. Results indicate that lexical features were much more important than acoustic features and suggest that previous findings using acoustic features might not generalize to spontaneous speech. Additional acoustic features are explored to improve performance.

This study investigated the effectiveness of hotkeys on a game pad (used with a standard mouse) and multi-touch in comparison to the standard mouse. The devices were the standard mouse and Belkin n52te, a 3M 22-finger multi-touch monitor, and the standard mouse alone. Participants were assigned one of these device configurations to complete 2 trials, an N-shaped maze and a spiral maze, each paired with simpler secondary tasks on the other side of the screen. The mazes had treasures to collect, attackers to avoid, and blockades to shoot down. No significance was observed for total maze completion time, but the Belkin n52te trended better than the other devices on all criteria.

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