Spaceteams: Sociotechnical Studies of Robotic Space Exploration

Janet Vertesi and Marisa Cohn are set to attend the NSF Socio-Computational Systems Workshop at the University of Minnesota next week. The Workshop will be an excellent opportunity to meet other PI's and Project Teams affiliated with the National Science Foundation's Socio-Computational Systems grant programs, to learn from each other's projects and work-in-progress.

Princeton University Undergraduate Sociology major Mauricio Lanio '11 successfully defended his senior thesis this morning. The thesis uses Social Network Analysis to examine co-authorship trends on the Cassini mission to Saturn, exploring the relationship between how science is organized and the kinds of collaboration patterns that ensue.

Janet Vertesi will present "The Value of Data" at CSCW 2011 this afternoon. The paper, co-written with Paul Dourish, examines the role of sociotechnical organization to data-sharing in planetary science. Reprint is available online. 

UCI doctoral candidate Marisa Cohn has been accepted to the Doctoral Consortium of the Socio-Computational Systems Workshop! The Doctoral Consortium, hosted by the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota, is an opportunity for advanced students working under the SOCS granting scheme, to discuss their dissertation work-in-progress with peers and outstanding faculty fellows. Marisa has been working with the Cassini team on the extraordinary software environment that supports Mission Operations. This is a terrific honor and opportunity for Marisa: Congratulations!

A paper by Vertesi and Dourish, “The Value of Data: Considering the Context of Production in Data Economies,” has been accepted to the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. The paper argues for the importance of the context of production, not just circulation and consumption, of scientific and other data as critical to determining how, where and why it may be shared. The paper will be presented in March, and will be posted on this site as a reprint as soon as it is available.