August 3, 2018
Paper co-author and award recipient HCDE Professor Mark Zachry (right), accepting the award on behalf of himself and PhD student Doug Divine, from conference co-chair Dr. Alan Chong (left).
Human Centered Design & Engineering PhD student Doug Divine and Professor Mark Zachry received a best paper award at the 2018 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference.
The paper, "Reflecting on Work in Project Based Organizations: Leveraging Email to Construct Activity System Models for Project Work," offers a new modeling approach for analyzing email attachments to construct models of the work being performed in project-based organizations. The research demonstrates the value of this model by applying it to an analysis of the Enron Corporation email corpus. The paper includes guidance for automating email attachment analysis and addresses the initial design of a system for presenting models of work activities to support reflection among project workers.
Divine and Zachry were awarded the James M. Lufkin Award for Best IPCC Paper, which recognizes the single best conference paper submitted to IPCC Proceedings. The winner is selected annually by the IPCC Conference Committee in consultation with the PCS Awards Committee.
The paper was authored as part of Divine's doctoral dissertation research, which is aimed at creating a new tool for project professionals that leverages existing tools (e.g., email and project management software) to enhance their understanding of the emerging forms of project work in organizations.