ARCH is a collaboration platform for small communities of intellectual inquiry. It integrates open source chat and videoconferencing tools with a sophisticated commenting and annotation engine for videos and transcripts, collaborative notetaking and document editing, and document sharing capabilities. In the wake of Covid-19 disruptions, the Santa Fe Institute realized that ubiquitous industry technologies like Zoom were ill-suited to extend into a hybrid space the rich collaborations and sub-communities that drive their research. In an effort led by SFI Vice President for Applied Complexity, Will Tracy, ARCH has been piloted successfully in a small number of events, including a 16-institution research network as well as a global SFI summer school. Funds from this grant support these activities, as well as the further development, documentation, research, and packaging of the ARCH platform so it can be used at wider scale both inside SFI and beyond.

Communal computing is a new computing paradigm in which people work together side-by-side in the real world, using their hands to create and explore computational models made of physical materials. In this project, a biotechnology lab will be restructured around communal computing, and a complete science project will be carried out in this new computing environment. The goal is to demonstrate an unprecedented level of visibility, agency, physicality and in-person collaboration. This effort aims to set the stage for a comprehensive transformation in how all scientists do their work together. This grant will support proof-of-concept use of the Realtalk system in a specific scientific context. Grant funds will support the construction of Realtalk communal computing environments which will be used by Shawn Douglas and others in his lab to advance the technology of DNA Origami.

This grant is to support work to study the role of technology (especially VR) in scientific team collaboration. Following on a broad agenda-setting Comment in Nature Human Behavior about the potential applications of the metaverse for science, Gomez-Zara and colleagues propose two experiments to explore the dynamics of scientific collaboration across different technology platforms. The first study will compare the performance of small teams collaborating to perform scientific tasks in person vs. via Zoom vs. in VR. The second study will introduce an additional variable, the presence of an AI team member powered by a Large Language Model, to understand whether participant interactions with the AI agent vary across the same three contexts. Questions about how the perceptions of and interactions with AI agents might be influenced by the medium of interaction are of particular interest and underexplored in human-AI interaction research community.