Keynote Speakers
We are delighted to have three world-leading experts in Group Decision and Negotiation deliver their keynotes
Wendi Adair, University of Waterloo, Canada
Just below the surface: Bringing the impact of culture on negotiation and group decision making into focus through observable verbal and nonverbal behaviours
The culture-as-an-iceberg metaphor illustrates that the visible part of culture (e.g. surface characteristics, dress, language), is small relative to the massive foundation (e.g. values, norms, and beliefs), that floats beneath the water. My research on culture and communication suggests that communication, both verbal and nonverbal, is a visible part of culture that we may not pay attention to because it lays below the surface of more observable characteristics. Culture impacts how people share information, posture and position, and temporally move through the process of interdependent decision making. In this address, I will explain the theoretical perspective of culture as communication and communication as culture, demonstrate research measuring culture’s influence on the negotiation process through verbal and nonverbal communication, and highlight future directions for research on cross-cultural and multi-cultural negotiation and group decision making.
Matthias Jarke, Aachen University, Germany
Combining Goal-driven and Data-Driven Approaches in Community Decision and Negotiation Support
In the last decade, social network analytics and related data analysis methodologies have helped big players gain enormous influence on the web, largely due to clever centralistic data collection in major data lakes. In the form of recommender systems, this can also be seen as world-scale group decision support. In our research, we have been more interested in how these kinds of technologies can spill over to smaller-scale communities of interest in the long tail of the internet. Examples include learning communities and open source software development communities of individuals, but also questions of controlled data and knowledge sharing among small and medium enterprises or medical institutions. Especially in the latter cases, we often face strongly conflicting goals that need to be negotiated to mutually acceptable solutions, quite along the original GDSS and NSS visions of Mel Shakun and colleagues. One example is medical research support on rare diseases which raises the need for data sharing across multiple health organizations (not necessarily being fond of each other) in a fully transparent, fraud-resistent research process while preserving best-possible privacy of patient data. The talk gives an overview of the Fraunhofer Industrial and Medical Data Space infrastructure initiatives which aim at rules and tools for data sovereignty in cross-organizational data analytics. Moreover, we demonstrate how this data-driven approach can be made adaptive to changing goals and context constraints of the stakeholders or the community as a whole, by linking it to conceptual
goal modeling approaches around the i* framework from the requirements engineering field.
Dov Te'eni, Tel Aviv University, Israel
A disturbing absence of abstraction levels in designing IT
People process and communicate information at multiple levels of abstraction when reading, talking, designing and making decisions. For example, in reading an article, actors may focus on a letter, a word, a clause, a sentence or a paragraph. At any moment, they focus on a particular level of abstraction, do something and move to other levels until they achieve their goal. Those who move between levels of abstraction when necessary perform better that those who do not. It follows that systems should be designed accordingly, yet there is hardly any explicit mention of abstraction levels in empirical studies or design guidelines of interactive systems. This paper proposes a method for incorporating abstraction levels in the design of human-computer interaction as a critical dimension of designing adaptive systems. It demonstrates the ideas with examples of feedback in systems that support individual and collaborative decision-making.