Shamsi Iqbal

Date: 14 December 2020

Time: 16:00 (CET)

Title: Redefining Productivity to Adapt to a Changing Landscape of Work

Abstract: As our work environments and work practices rapidly evolves as a result of the changing landscape of work, what we envision as the future of work is being fundamentally challenged. Research in the area of productivity and multitasking has to adapt to the changing world anticipating what the future may look like - in particular taking into account growing needs of balancing work and life. In this research I will talk about redefining productivity where doing work is no longer confined to being at a desk and the need to do things while on the go or while in divided attention scenarios continues to dominate. Our team at Microsoft Research has looked at how complex tasks can be done without having to allocate larger chunks of time, rather, make use of seemingly unusable ‘micromoments’ – by decomposing a task into smaller tasks that can be done in a few moments. This work brings together theories from cognitive science, human computer interaction and artificial intelligence. I will discuss a few ongoing projects in this area and present directions for research and product development.

Speaker Biography: Dr. Shamsi T. Iqbal is a Principal Researcher in the Productivity and Intelligence group (P+I) in Microsoft Research, Redmond. Her primary expertise is in the domain of Attention Management and Interruptions. More recently her work has focused on redefining productivity, introducing novel ways of being productive through leveraging micromoments and balancing productivity and well-being in interaction design. Her work on driving and distraction has been featured in the New York Times, MIT Tech Review among others, and also featured in the King 5 News (NBC affiliate in the Seattle area). Shamsi has served on many organizing and program committees for Human-Computer Interaction conferences, is currently serving as an ACM TOCHI Associate Editor and was the General Co-chair for UIST 2020. Shamsi received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2008 and Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in 2001.

Homepage: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/shamsi/