Gloria Mark
Chancellor's Professor Informatics | UC Irvine
Irvine, CA, UNITED STATES
Gloria Mark's research area is human-computer interaction (HCI) studying how technology has impacted individuals, groups, and society.
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Biography
Gloria Mark is Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD from Columbia University in psychology. She has been a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research since 2012. Her primary research interest is in understanding the impact of digital media on people's lives and she is best known for her work in studying people's multitasking, mood and behavior while using digital media in real world environments. She has published over 150 papers in the top journals and conferences in the fields of human-computer interactions (HCI) and Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and is author of the book Multitasking in the Digital Age. She was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2017 in recognition for her contribution in HCI. She has been a Fulbright scholar and has received an NSF Career grant. Her work has been recognized outside of academia: she has been invited to present her work at SXSW and the Aspen Ideas Festival and her work on multitasking has appeared in the popular media, e.g. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Atlantic, the BBC, and many others. She was general co-chair of the ACM CHI 2017 conference, was papers chair of ACM CSCW 2012 and ACM CSCW 2006, and currently serves as Associate Editor of the ACM TOCHI and Human-Computer Interaction journals.
Areas of Expertise (4)
Information Technology
Email Interruptions
Human-Computer Interaction
Multi-Tasking
Accomplishments (3)
ACM CHI Academy (professional)
2017
Google Research Award (professional)
2014
IBM Faculty Award (professional)
2013
Education (2)
Columbia University: PhD, Psychology 1991
The University of Michigan: MS, Biostatistics 1984
Affiliations (3)
- Assoc. for Computing Machinery (ACM) : Member
- ACM SIGCHI
- Fulbright Association
Links (3)
Media Appearances (5)
Understanding attention and a craving for certainty
ABC Radio National online
2025-03-07
Gloria Mark, UC Irvine professor of informatics warned us that the average attention span is shrinking. “We have been tracking attention spans over the last 20 years. … In the last five years we found the average time [spent on any particular screen before switching] is 47 seconds.” … “People have limited attentional capacity, there are things that we can do to boost capacity ….”
Why You Feel Like An Imposter, Burnt Out, And Distracted At Work — And What To Do About It
Allwork.Space online
2025-02-26
Even if you manage to keep imposter syndrome in check and avoid burnout, there’s one more obstacle in the way of success: attention fatigue. “I started measuring attention spans on screens 20 years ago, and we found them to average about two and a half minutes,” says Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor Emerita at the University of California, [Irvine] a leading researcher on attention spans and digital habits. “And that shocked me at the time because I thought, wow, that’s pretty short. But it really surprised me that after 20 years, people average 47 seconds.”
We must wage war on screens
Business & Financial Times Online online
2025-02-11
Researchers installed tracking software on their computers to monitor their daily activities. The findings revealed that students, on average, changed tasks approximately every 65 seconds. Their median attention span on any single activity lasted only 19 seconds. Another study conducted by Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, found that the average office worker remains focused on a single task for only three minutes. The near-ceaseless cacophony of beeps, notifications, and popups has created a commensurate escalation in screentime.
7 Habits to Stay Focused in a World Full of Distractions
Harvard Business Review online
2025-02-04
Many of us believe we’re adept at juggling interruptions, but research tells a different story, according to Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness, and Productivity. “Think of your mind as a whiteboard,” she says. “Each task or topic you focus on is like writing on that whiteboard. When you multitask, you’re constantly erasing and rewriting different information.”
Where did our attention spans go, and can we get them back? – podcast
The Guardian - Science Weekly online
2025-01-09
Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, has been studying our waning attention spans for 20 years. She tells Madeleine Finlay why she believes our powers of concentration are not beyond rescue and reveals her top tips for finding focus.
Articles (5)
Characterizing Exploratory Behaviors on a Personal Visualization Interface Using Interaction Logs
OSF PreprintsPoorna TalkadSukumar, Gonzalo J Martinez, Ted Grover, Gloria Mark, Sidney D'Mello, Nitesh V Chawla, Stephen M Mattingly, Aaron D Striegel
2020 Personal visualizations present a separate class of visualizations where users interact with their own data to draw inferences about themselves. In this paper, we study how a realistic understanding of personal visualizations can be gained from analyzing user interactions. We designed an interface presenting visualizations of the personal data gathered in a prior study and logged interactions from 369 participants as they each explored their own data.
A Multisensor Person-Centered Approach to Understand the Role of Daily Activities in Job Performance with Organizational Personas
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous TechnologiesVedant Das Swain, Koustuv Saha, Hemang Rajvanshy, Anusha Sirigiri, Julie M Gregg, Suwen Lin, Gonzalo J Martinez, Stephen M Mattingly, Shayan Mirjafari, Raghu Mulukutla, Subigya Nepal, Kari Nies, Manikanta D Reddy, Pablo Robles-Granda, Andrew T Campbell, Nitesh V Chawla, Sidney D'Mello, Anind K Dey, Kaifeng Jiang, Qiang Liu, Gloria Mark, Edward Moskal, Aaron Striegel, Louis Tay, Gregory D Abowd, Munmun De Choudhury
2019 Several psychologists posit that performance is not only a function of personality but also of situational contexts, such as day-level activities. Yet in practice, since only personality assessments are used to infer job performance, they provide a limited perspective by ignoring activity. However, multi-modal sensing has the potential to characterize these daily activities. This paper illustrates how empirically measured activity data complements traditional effects of personality to explain a worker's performance.
Stress and productivity patterns of interrupted, synergistic, and antagonistic office activities
Scientific DataShaila Zaman, Amanveer Wesley, Dennis Rodrigo Da Cunha Silva, Pradeep Buddharaju, Fatema Akbar, Ge Gao, Gloria Mark, Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna & Ioannis Pavlidis
2019 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 for n = 63 knowledge workers who volunteered for this experiment and were randomly assigned into four groups: (G1/G2) Batch email interruptions with/without exogenous stress.
The Perpetual Work Life of Crowdworkers: How Tooling Practices Increase Fragmentation in Crowdwork
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer InteractionAlex C Williams, Gloria Mark, Kristy Milland, Edward Lank, Edith Law
2019 Crowdworkers regularly support their work with scripts, extensions, and software to enhance their productivity. Despite their evident significance, little is understood regarding how these tools affect crowdworkers' quality of life and work. In this study, we report findings from an interview study (N=21) aimed at exploring the tooling practices used by full-time crowdworkers on Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Understanding smartphone usage in college classrooms: A long-term measurement study
Computers & EducationInyeop Kim, Rihun Kim, Heepyung Kim, Duyeon Kim, Kyungsik Han, Paul H Lee, Gloria Mark, Uichin Lee
2019 Smartphone usage is widespread in college classrooms, but there is a lack of measurement studies. We conducted a 14-week measurement study in the wild with 84 first-year college students in Korea. We developed a data collection and processing tool for usage logging, mobility tracking, class evaluation, and class attendance detection. Using this dataset, we quantify students' smartphone usage patterns in the classrooms, ranging from simple use duration and frequency to temporal rhythms and interaction patterns.
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