As the volume and complexity of distributed online work increases, the collaboration among people who have never worked together in the past is becoming increasingly necessary. Recent research has proposed algorithms to maximize the performance of such teams by grouping workers according to a set of predefined decision criteria. This approach micro-manages workers, who have no say in the team formation process. Depriving users of control over who they will work with stifles creativity, causes psychological discomfort and results in less-than-optimal collaboration results. In this work, we propose an alternative model, called Self-Organizing Teams (SOTs), which relies on the crowd of online workers itself to organize into effective teams. Supported but not guided by an algorithm, SOTs are a new human-centered computational structure, which enables participants to control, correct and guide the output of their collaboration as a collective. Experimental results, comparing SOTs to two benchmarks that do not offer user agency over the collaboration, reveal that participants in the SOTs condition produce results of higher quality and report higher teamwork satisfaction. We also find that, similarly to machine learning-based self-organization, human SOTs exhibit emergent collective properties, including the presence of an objective function and the tendency to form more distinct clusters of compatible teammates.
The Proficiency-Congruency Dilemma: Virtual Team Design and Performance in Multiplayer Online Games
多人在线战斗竞技场游戏提供了研究团队表现的绝佳机会。在设计团队时，玩家必须在选择最符合其经验的角色和最能补充团队中现有角色的角色之间协商\textit{proficiency-congruency dilemma}。我们采用混合方法的方法来探讨用户如何协商这个困境。使用数据从\textit{League of Legends}，我们定义了一个相似性空间，可操作的团队设计结构的角色熟练度，通用性和一致性。我们收集了336万用户的公开数据，以测试这些结构对团队绩效的影响。我们还与新手和精英玩家进行焦点小组讨论，以了解玩家的团队设计实践如何随专业知识而变化。我们发现，球员的熟练程度增加团队绩效比团队一致性。这些发现对球员、设计师和理论家都有一定的启示，他们可以建议如何将个人的专业知识和团队的兼容性放在首位。
Socially fluent AI decouples conversational signals from source identity in online interaction
School of Education, Tsinghua University（清华大学教育学院）；Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University（墨尔本大学信息技术学院）；Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong（香港大学教育学院）
