Gloria Mark Keynote Speaker

Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine
Visiting senior researcher, Microsoft Research & Author of the forthcoming book “Attention Span" fom Hanover Square Press
Her research focuses on the relationship between digital and offline behavior

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Gloria Mark's Biography

Dr. Gloria Mark is Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She has also been a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research since 2012. She received her PhD from Columbia University in psychology. Her research concerns understanding the impact of digital media on people’s lives, and she is best known for her work in studying people’s attention behavior while using their computers and phones in real world environments. In 2017 she was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy in recognition for her contribution to the field of human-computer interaction. She has published in the top journals and conferences in this field, has received numerous paper awards, and serves on editorial boards of top journals in the field. She has been a Fulbright scholar and has received the National Science Foundation Career grant. She has been invited to present her work at SXSW and the Aspen Ideas Festival and her work on multitasking has appeared often in the popular media, e.g. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Atlantic, the BBC, and many others. Her book “Attention Span,” is forthcoming from Hanover Square Press.

Speaking Topics:

Understanding Workplace Well-Being and Productivity: The future of work will involve gaining a deep understanding of people’s workplace experience and use that understanding to develop solutions that improve health, mood, and productivity. Using wearable sensors, and other techniques, we can analyze digital media use and understand how attention varies over the workday. My goal is to gain a deep understanding of people’s digital behaviors and what affect them, so as to promote well-being and productivity.
Are we reaching a new normal? Attention focus, distractions and productivity with our digital experience: Most of us spend our days among two different environments: an offline physical world but also an online digital world. In current times, many people are spending more time with digital media than ever before. In this talk I will discuss scientific research into how people use digital media in their everyday lives. Our research has identified that people have short attention spans and are highly distractible when on devices. I will first talk about the role of our cognition in using digital media and how our mental resources become overused, for example when people switch rapidly among multiple tasks or try to inhibit distractions. Attention is goal-directed, and maintaining goals is especially hard when working with digital media where there are competing demands on attention. Attentional states can also vary over the day depending on our moods, tasks, and context. There are also individual differences and physiological effects in maintaining focus while on digital media. More broadly, I claim that placing the burden on individuals be self-disciplined to focus is the wrong approach. I will discuss reasons why we it is so hard for us to focus when we use our devices and what we might do to become less stressed and more productive in our everyday lives.