Assistant Professor John Taylor Awarded National Science Foundation Grant
10/07/2009
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Information and Intelligent Systems program has awarded Columbia University $316,582 and the University of Washington $128,251 for a three year collaborative research effort to study trends in the globalization and virtualization of engineering work. The project involves collaborators at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and the Helsinki University of Technology. Principal Investigator John E. Taylor from the Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics Department at Columbia describes that "researching virtual organizations challenges researchers to adapt to new constraints and provides possibilities to exploit new opportunities." In studying the organizational implications of executing complex engineering work in virtual environments, Taylor found that traditional organizational research methodologies were time consuming, often difficult to implement, and failed to exploit the information richness of the virtual environment.
The funded research has two key components aimed at developing fundamental knowledge about global virtual engineering work. The research team will first develop an automated research data collection and analysis tool integrated into the CyberGRID (Cyber-enabled Global Research Infrastructure for Design) developed by Taylor and collaborators at the Helsinki University of Technology. Once the data collection/analysis tool is complete, the research involves executing three experiments to develop fundamental insights into how globally distributed engineers enact complex design work together and with affordances in virtual working environments.