Tarleton Research Team Looks to Develop Smart Meeting Assistant

Tarleton State University faculty member Dr. Jonali Baruah, with her team members Dr. Jugal Kalita and Dr. Lauren Coursey, has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to develop and improve the productivity of video-based team innovation.

The $149,974 grant will support their project, “The Future of Virtual Teams: Enhancing Collaborative Creativity and Socio-cognitive Well-being in Video-based Teams.”

The project aims to develop a novel Smart Meeting Assistant to enhance the efficiency of video-based teams. This interdisciplinary research paves the path for bringing the recent advances in psychological sciences supported by deep learning and data analytics with a strong focus on human factors and ergonomics, to design virtual sociotechnical systems facilitating collaborative innovation. 

“Through this research, we aim to provide a socio-technical solution — weaving together psychology and machine learning that will transform virtual team innovation, well-being and equity at the workplace,” said Dr. Baruah, an Associate Professor of psychological sciences at Tarleton’s School of Behavioral Sciences and the project’s principal investigator.

She also hopes to use the funding to collaborate with industry partners, recruit and mentor minority students, and get students involved in hack-a-thons and other campus events.

Photo Courtesy of Anna Shvets