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Convergence science is an intrepid form of interdisciplinarity defined by the US National Research Council as ‘the coming together of insights and approaches from originally distinct fields’ to strategically address grand challenges. Despite its increasing relevance to science policy and institutional design, there is still no practical framework for measuring convergence. We address this gap by developing a measure of disciplinary distance based upon disciplinary boundaries delineated by hierarchical ontologies. We apply this approach using two widely used ontologies—the Classification of Instructional Programs and the Medical Subject Headings—each comprised of thousands of entities that facilitate classifying two distinct research dimensions, respectively. The social dimension codifies the disciplinary pedigree of individual scholars, connoting core expertise associated with traditional modes of mono-disciplinary graduate education. The conceptual dimension codifies the knowledge, methods, and equipment fundamental to a given target problem, which together may exceed the researchers’ core expertise. Considered in tandem, this decomposition facilitates measuring social-conceptual alignment and optimizing team assembly around domain-spanning problems—a key aspect that eludes other approaches. We demonstrate the utility of this framework in a case study of the human brain science (HBS) ecosystem, a relevant convergence nexus that highlights several practical considerations for designing, evaluating, institutionalizing, and accelerating convergence. Econometric analysis of 655,386 publications derived from 9,121 distinct HBS scholars reveals a 11.4% article-level citation premium attributable to research featuring full topical convergence, and an additional 2.7% citation premium if the social (disciplinary) configuration of scholars is maximally aligned with the conceptual (topical) configuration of the research.

 

Paper and proposal deadlines are important milestones, conjuring up emotional memories to researchers. The question is if in the daily challenging world of scholarly research, deadlines truly incur higher sympathetic loading than the alternative. Here we report results from a longitudinal, in the wild study of n = 10 researchers working in the presence and absence of impeding deadlines. Unlike the retrospective, questionnaire-based studies of research deadlines in the past, our study is real-time and multimodal, including physiological, observational, and psychometric measurements. The results suggest that deadlines do not significantly add to the sympathetic loading of researchers. Irrespective of deadlines, the researchers’ sympathetic activation is strongly associated with the amount of reading and writing they do, the extent of smartphone use, and the frequency of physical breaks they take. The latter likely indicates a natural mechanism for regulating sympathetic overactivity in deskbound research, which can inform the design of future break interfaces. 

Deadlines are constitutional aspects of research life that the CHI community frequently observes. Despite their importance, deadlines are understudied. Here we bring a mixed art and science perspective on deadlines, which may find broader applications as a starter methodology. In a field study, we monitored four academics at the office, two days before a deadline and two regular days, after the deadline had passed. Based on face video, questionnaire, and interview data we constructed their profiles. We added a dose of fictionalization to these profiles, composing anonymized comic stories that are as humorous as they are enlightening. In the stressful and lonely days towards deadlines, the only common presence in all cases is the researchers’ computer. Accordingly, this work aspires to prompt an effort for a deeper understanding of “deadline users’’, in support of designing much needed affective interfaces. 

We describe a controlled experiment, aiming to study productivity and stress effects of email interruptions and activity interactions in the modern office. The measurement set includes multimodal data forn = 63 knowledge workers who volunteered for this experiment and were randomly assigned into four groups: (G1/G2) Batch email interruptions with/without exogenous stress. (G3/G4) Continual email interruptions with/without exogenous stress. To provide context, the experiment’s email treatments were surrounded by typical office tasks. The captured variables include physiological indicators of stress, measures of report writing quality and keystroke dynamics, as well as psychometric scores and biographic information detailing participants’ profiles. Investigations powered by this dataset are expected to lead to personalized recommendations for handling email interruptions and a deeper understanding of synergistic and antagonistic office activities. Given the centrality of email in the modern office, and the importance of office work to people’s lives and the economy, the present data have a valuable role to play.

 

Workplace environments are characterized by frequent interruptions that can lead to stress. However, measures of stress due to interruptions are typically obtained through self-reports, which can be affected by memory and emotional biases. In this paper, we use a thermal imaging system to obtain objective measures of stress and investigate personality differences in contexts of high and low interruptions. Since a major source of workplace interruptions is email, we studied 63 participants while multitasking in a controlled office environment with two different email contexts: managing email in batch mode or with frequent interruptions. We discovered that people who score high in Neuroticism are significantly more stressed in batching environments than those low in Neuroticism. People who are more stressed finish emails faster. Last, using Linguistic Inquiry Word Count on the email text, we find that higher stressed people in multitasking environments use more anger in their emails. These findings help to disambiguate prior conflicting results on email batching and stress.