Killer Apps: Developing Novel Applications That Enhance Team Coordination, Communication, and Effectiveness

Abstract

As part of the Lorentz workshop, “Interdisciplinary Insights into Group and Team Dynamics,” held in Leiden, Netherlands, this article describes how Geeks and Groupies (computer and social scientists) may benefit from interdisciplinary collaboration toward the development of killer apps in team contexts that are meaningful and challenging for both. First, we discuss interaction processes during team meetings as a research topic for both Groupies and Geeks. Second, we highlight teamwork in health care settings as an interdisciplinary research challenge. Third, we discuss how an automated solution for optimal team design could benefit team effectiveness and feed into team-based interventions. Fourth, we discuss team collaboration in massive open online courses as a challenge for both Geeks and Groupies. We argue for the necessary integration of social and computational research insights and approaches. In the hope of inspiring future interdisciplinary collaborations, we develop criteria for evaluating killer apps—including the four proposed here—and discuss future research challenges and opportunities that potentially derive from these developments.

Initiating and Maintaining Collaborations and Facilitating Understanding in Interdisciplinary Group Research

“…The workshop that was the foundation for this special issue displays evidence of the suggestions in this essay (Lehmann-Willenbrock, Hung, & Keyton, 2017, in this special issue). Below is a brief description of the initiation and maintenance stages of the workshop.…”

“…In this article, we provide suggestions that may be beneficial when starting research collaboration between computer scientists and social scientists. These techniques were developed during a recent interdisciplinary 4-day workshop (Lehmann-Willenbrock, Hung, & Keyton, 2017, in this special issue). In the initial meeting, it may be helpful to put research agendas aside and simply ask about the other group members.…”

How Approaches to Animal Swarm Intelligence Can Improve the Study of Collective Intelligence in Human Teams

“…This would enable the calculation of social network measures, such as node centrality and network density, which could be related to psychological constructs, such as individual leadership and group cohesion, respectively (Chaffin et al 2017;Wise 2014). Thus, psychologists and engineers have the potential for productive collaborations in which they can work together to design tools for measuring team behaviors, interactions, and outcomes, to process the data streams that these tools produce and to align behavioral measures with meaningful psychological constructs (Buengeler et al 2017).…”

Pushing Interdisciplinary in the Study of Groups and Teams

“…felt and expressed in the Lorentz, Netherlands workshop, “New Frontiers in Analyzing Dynamic Group Interactions: Bridging Social and Computer Science.” 1 With only a few exceptions, the computer science participants knew (or knew of) the other computer scientists (also known as geeks , a label we used at the workshop), and the group scholar participants (also known as groupies , another label we used at the workshop) knew (or knew of) the other groupies. So, as group research on group formation would suggest, the first few activities were spent in introducing ourselves and our research interests to one another (see Lehmann-Willenbrock, Hung, & Keyton, 2017). While we found some common ground, we also found differences in theory (see Reiter-Palmon, Sinha, Gevers, Odobez, & Volpe, 2017), and workflow (see Allen et al, 2017).…”

“…Buengeler, Klonek, Lehmann-Willenbrock, Morency, and Poppe (2017) offer several ideas for killer apps that would require group and geek collaboration. Not only would these apps enhance interdisciplinary collaboration, they would serve as prominent public-facing examples of the value of interdisciplinary collaboration between geeks and groupies.…”