Gloria Mark 
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)
Microtasks Might Be the Future of White-Collar Work
Wired online
2019-11-19
Microproductivity emerged in part as an evolutionary response to everyone's number one complaint about office life: interruptions. It takes 25 minutes to truly resume a task we've been distracted from, on average. Even still, our attention shifts across our computer screen every 47 seconds, as research by Gloria Mark, an informatics professor at UC Irvine, has found. And with each interruption we often lose context. When we come back, we tend to forget what the heck we were doing.
Was E-mail a Mistake?
The New Yorker online
2019-08-06
Other large office buildings also experimented with pneumatic solutions. But the expense and complexity of these systems rendered them essentially impractical. Then, in the nineteen-eighties, a far more convenient technology arrived, in the form of desktop computers connected through digital networks. As these networks spread, e-mail emerged as the killer app for bringing asynchronous communication to the office. To better understand this shift, I talked to Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies the impact that computer technology has had on the workplace. “I can show it to you,” she told me, when I asked about the spread of e-mail. She showed me a data table she had constructed, which summarized the results of office-time-use studies from 1965 to 2006. The studies can be divided into two groups: before e-mail and after. In the studies conducted before e-mail, workers spent around forty per cent of their time in “scheduled meetings,” and twenty per cent engaged in “desk work.” In those conducted after e-mail, the percentages are swapped.
Your biggest distraction at work isn’t your phone or social media
Fast Company online
2019-06-28
However, according to UC Irvine’s Gloria Mark, we’re just as likely to interrupt ourselves as get interrupted by something external. As Goleman puts it, “It’s not the chatter of people around us that is the most powerful distractor, but rather the chatter of our own minds.”
Gloria Mark gets grant to study workplace stress
UCI online
2018-02-21
Informatics professor Gloria Mark has been awarded a National Science Foundation Cyber-Human Systems grant to study methods of identifying and addressing workplace stress. The $1.2 million grant runs through July 2020 and will be shared with co-investigators Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna of Texas A&M University and Ioannis Pavlidis of the University of Houston. Mark’s portion of the funding is $420,000. The research goals are twofold: to detect stress using devices commonly found at work (such as webcams, fitness trackers and keyboards) and to reduce stress through relaxation exercises using personalized predictive models and interventions. The team will utilize machine learning to determine whether such devices can accurately predict stress levels, and they will conduct a long-term study in a real office environment to test the validity of their work. The researchers will also create a framework for recommending brief stress reduction exercises based on the current context. Through iterative prototyping, they aim to develop mobile apps that employ biofeedback, games and music to support breathing exercises and promote relaxation.
UCI study links selfies, happiness
UCI News online
2016-09-13
“You see a lot of reports in the media about the negative impacts of technology use, and we look very carefully at these issues here at UCI,” said senior author Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics. “But there have been expanded efforts over the past decade to study what’s become known as ‘positive computing,’ and I think this study shows that sometimes our gadgets can offer benefits to users.”
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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