Abstract

As computer mediated communication increases collaboration across broad distances, global teams that involve people speaking different languages are starting to play a significant role in many organizations. While global teams tend to be productive in many ways, the team members often suffer from language barriers – non-native speakers are often left behind discussions and cannot express their thoughts in the meetings. In this talk, I will address several key challenges of supporting non-native speakers in a real-time meeting. For example, although information technologies such as machine translation and speech recognition technologies have the potential to reduce the language barriers, they also run the risk of posing further burden on non-native speakers. I will present some recent findings of how to effectively support non-native speakers in global teams.

Bio

Naomi Yamashita is a primary researcher at NTT Communication Science Laboratories. She received her B.Eng and M.Eng degrees in Applied Mathematics and Physics from Kyoto University in 1999 and 2001 respectively. After joining NTT, she received her Ph.D. in Social Informatics from Kyoto University in 2006. Her primary interests lie in the areas of computer-supported cooperative work and computer mediated communication. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods, she aims to uncover the nature of human interaction and to design new communication technologies for better human life. Her current projects include technological support for multilingual communication, studies on mental healthcare, and the development of video systems that facilitates group-to- group distant collaboration.

All faculties and students are welcome to join.