Gloria Mark

Chancellor's Professor Informatics UC Irvine

  • Irvine CA

Gloria Mark's research area is human-computer interaction (HCI) studying how technology has impacted individuals, groups, and society.

Contact

UC Irvine

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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

Information Technology
Email Interruptions
Human-Computer Interaction
Multi-Tasking

Accomplishments

ACM CHI Academy

2017

Google Research Award

2014

IBM Faculty Award

2013

Education

Columbia University

PhD

Psychology

1991

The University of Michigan

MS

Biostatistics

1984

Affiliations

  • Assoc. for Computing Machinery (ACM) : Member
  • ACM SIGCHI
  • Fulbright Association

Media Appearances

Easily distracted? How to improve your attention span

Associated Press  online

2025-05-17

Feel like you can’t focus? … You’re far from alone. One body of decades-long research (led by Gloria Mark, UC Irvine professor emeritus of informatics) found the average person’s attention span for a single screen is 47 seconds, down from 2.5 minutes in 2004. The 24/7 news cycle, uncertainty about the state of the world and countless hours of screen time don’t help, experts say.

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Too much mindless scrolling can shrink your attention span: ‘The problem is we can’t pull ourselves out,’ psychologist says

CNBC Make It  online

2025-04-14

Are we consuming too much content? Yes, and it’s overwhelming us, says psychologist Gloria Mark. “When we’re overwhelmed with processing so much information, our cognitive resources drain. When they drain, our mind gets fatigued,” she tells CNBC Make It. Mark is also a Chancellor’s professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine. … “When you get into this habit of consuming short-form and shallow content, it’s really hard to pull out and take a deep dive into consuming books or long-form articles.” Mark says. … Mark offers up some tips for how to spend more time engaging with longer form content: ….

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The Daily Habit That Kills Productivity—And How to Fix It

Best Life  online

2025-04-09

Gloria Mark, PhD, a professor at the University of California Irvine, highlighted on a recent American Psychological Association podcast that our attention span has plummeted. In the early 2000s, we could stay focused on a screen for an average of two and a half minutes. In the last five years, it's fallen to just 47 seconds - and it's only continuing to decline. … One study found that the impact of interrupted work can be devastating in terms of added stress.

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Articles

Characterizing Exploratory Behaviors on a Personal Visualization Interface Using Interaction Logs

OSF Preprints

Poorna 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.

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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 Technologies

Vedant 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.

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Stress and productivity patterns of interrupted, synergistic, and antagonistic office activities

Scientific Data

Shaila 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.

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