Mobile Office

Overview

The Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier (FW-HTF) is one of 10 new Big Ideas for Future Investment announced by NSF. The FW-HTF cross-directorate program aims to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the changing landscape of jobs and work by supporting convergent research. This project contributes to this goal by examining whether and how novel in-vehicle technology can safely improve worker productivity, and well-being.

Current trends in the automobile industry make cars increasingly automated, allowing them to take on a growing number of driving tasks, while freeing the driver to engage in other activities. Millions of people spend nearly an hour of each work day commuting by car. Automated vehicles could allow part of the time currently spent driving to be used for work-related efforts. The goal of this project is to understand how current and future technologies might enable work to be done in automated vehicles.

Reclaiming productive time from time currently taken up by driving could increase economic productivity, worker wellbeing, and firm profitability. The project focuses on understanding how technology can allow commuters to safely combine or switch between work and driving tasks. A new multi-interface in-vehicle environment for the support of work-related tasks, as well as safe driving, in automated vehicles will be developed and tested in driving simulators and real vehicles. The innovative contributions to the in-vehicle use of speech and spoken interactions, augmented reality, and tangible user interfaces will have applicability to a broad range of settings, including for non-drivers and in mobile environments beyond the car. The project also includes activities to promote the participation of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

Creating the systems that will allow drivers to safely engage in work-related activities in automated vehicles requires an interdisciplinary effort. This project will explore what types of work in automated vehicles can improve workers' job satisfaction and productivity, and the productivity and profitability of firms. Based on these findings, the team will create in-vehicle user interfaces that support work tasks, as well as safe transitions between engaging in work tasks and in driving. Three types of user interfaces will be integrated: voice interfaces, augmented reality interfaces, and tangible interfaces. The team will also develop a probabilistic model to examine the ability of the in-vehicle interfaces to communicate to the driver the mode and limitations of the vehicle automation. The team will close the loop with design guidelines, by providing researchers, practitioners, and policy makers a broad set of guidelines, along with careful reasoning for their application in the design of human-machine interaction to support the work-related tasks of workers in automated vehicles.

Research Goals

1. Identifying the needs of workers and firms.

2. A new multi-interface in-vehicle environment for the support of work-related and wellbeing tasks, as well as safe driving.

3. Probabilistic model that describes in-vehicle subtasks, work-related, and driving-related, at a high level of abstraction and relate performance to tasks characteristics.

4. Design guidelines, providing researchers, practitioners, and government a broad set of guidelines, about the design of human-machine interaction to support the work-related and wellbeing tasks.

Our Team

Linda Ng Boyle

University of Washington

linda [at] uw.edu

Linda Ng Boyle is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. Dr. Boyle's research centers on driving behavior, crash countermeasures, crash and safety analysis, and statistical modeling. Dr. Boyle is an associate editor for the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention and serves on the Transportation Research Board committees on Simulation and Measurement of Vehicle and Operator Performance and Statistical Methodology in Transportation Research.

Andrew Kun

University of New Hampshire

andrew.kun [at] unh.edu

Andrew Kun is an Associate Professor at UNH, ECE Department. Andrew was the principal investigator of the Project54 effort which involved integrating embedded mobile computing equipment and wireless networking into police cruisers. Currently, a significant part of Andrew’s research is focused on driving simulator-based exploration of in-car user interfaces, and estimation methods of the drivers’ cognitive load to determine the effect of the user interface on the driving performance.

John D. Lee

University of Wisconson

jdlee [at] engr.wisc.edu

John D Lee currently works at the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Wisconsin–Madison. John does research in Cognitive Engineering, with a focus on human-automation interaction. He is also a co-author of the third edition of the popular introductory human factors textbook.

Raffaella Sadun

Harvard Business School

rsadun [at] hbs.edu

Raffaella Sadun is the Thomas S. Murphy Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. Professor Sadun's research focuses on the economics of productivity, management and organizational change. Her research documents the economic and cultural determinants of managerial choices, as well as their implications for organizational performance in both the private and public secto

Orit Shaer

Wellesley College

oshaer [at] wellesley.edu

Orit Shaer is the Class of 1966 Associate Professor of Computer Science and co-director of the Media Arts and Sciences Program at Wellesley College. She found and directs the Wellesley College Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab. Her research focuses on next generation user interfaces including virtual and augmented reality, tangible, gestural, tactile, and multi touch interaction.

Publications

Lisa Orii, Diana Tosca, Andrew L. Kun, Orit Shaer, Perceptions of Trucking Automation: Insights from the r/Truckers Community. AutomotiveUI 2021.

Divyabharathi Nagaraju, Alberta A. Ansah, Nabil Al Nahin Ch, Caitlin Mills, Christian P. Janssen, Orit Shaer, Andrew Kun, How Will Drivers Take Back Control in Automated Vehicles? A Driving Simulator Test of an Interleaving Framework. AutomotiveUI 2021.

Lisa Orii, Diana Tosca, Andrew L. Kun, Orit Shaer (2021), Perceptions on the Future of Automation in r/Truckers, In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (CHI EA '21).

Thomaz Teodorovicz, Andrew L. Kun, Raffaella Sadun, Orit Shaer (2021), Multitasking while Driving: Results from a Time Use Study of Commuting Knowledge Workers (under review).

Nabil CH and Alberta A. Ansah, Atefeh Katrahmani, Julia Burmeister, Andrew L. Kun, Caitlin Mills, Orit Shaer, and John Lee, Conducting a Remote Virtual Reality Experiment during COVID-19. ACM CHI’21 Remote XR Studies: Exploring Three Key Challenges of Remote XR Experimentation.

Thomaz Teodorovicz, Raffaella Sadun, Andrew L. Kun and Orit Shaer, Working from Home during COVID-19: Evidence from Time-Use Studies. Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 21-094, March 2021.

Andrew L. Kun, Raffaella Sadun, Orit Shaer, and Thomaz Teodorovicz, Where Did the Commute Time Go? Harvard Business Review Home, December 2020.

Andrew L. Kun, Orit Shaer, Raffaella Sadun, Linda Ng Boyle, John D. Lee, The future of work and play: From automated vehicles to working from home. Microsoft Research Symposium on New Future of Work, August 2020.

Andrew L. Kun, Orit Shaer, Raffaella Sadun, Linda Ng Boyle, John D. Lee, The future of work and wellbeing: A preliminary report from a series of conversations. Microsoft Research Symposium on New Future of Work, August 2020.

Andreas Riegler, Andreas Riener, Andrew L. Kun, Joe Gabbard, Stephen Brewster, Carolin Wienrich, MRV 2019: 3rd Workshop on Mixed Reality for Intelligent Vehicles. AutomotiveUI 2019.

Andrew L. Kun, Orit Shaer, Andreas Riener, Stephen Brewster, Clemens Schartmueller, AutoWork 2019: Workshop on the Future of Work and Well-Being in Automated Vehicles. AutomotiveUI 2019.

Anna-Katharina Frison, Philipp Wintersberger, Andreas Riener, Clemens Schartmüller, Linda Ng Boyle, Erika Miller, Klemens Weigl, In UX We Trust: Investigation of Aesthetics and Usability of Driver-Vehicle Interfaces and Their Impact on the Perception of Automated Driving. CHI '19 Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Paper No. 144.

Christian P.Janssena, Shamsi T.Iqbalb, Andrew L.Kun, Stella F.Donkera, Interrupted by my car? Implications of interruption and interleaving research for automated vehicles. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies Volume 130, October 2019, Pages 221-233.

Andrew L. Kun, Orit Shaer, Raffaella Sadun, Linda Ng Boyle, John D. Lee, Towards Work in Automated Vehicles. ACM CHI’19 Workshop on Looking into the Future: Weaving the Threads of Vehicle Automation, 2019.