Three decades of creating software to support design rationale showed the author how rationale processes can promote generation of novel ideas. Rationale can promote creative design by promoting critical conversations among designers and other project participants. Critical conversations intertwine ideation and evaluation, using feedback about consequences of decisions to challenge designers to...

We are interested in understanding speech overlaps and their function in human conversations. Previous studies on speech overlaps have relied on supervised methods, small corpora and controlled conversations. The characterization of overlaps based on timing, semantic and discourse function requires an analysis over a very large feature space. In this study, the corpus of overlapped speech segme...

In this work, we focus on semantic parsing of natural language conversations. Most existing methods for semantic parsing are based on understanding the semantics of a single sentence at a time. However, understanding conversations also requires an understanding of conversational context and discourse structure across sentences. We formulate semantic parsing of conversations as a structured pred...

Mental illness is one of the most pressing public health issues of our time. While counseling and psychotherapy can be effective treatments, our knowledge about how to conduct successful counseling conversations has been limited due to lack of large-scale data with labeled outcomes of the conversations. In this paper, we present a large-scale, quantitative study on the discourse of text-message...

providing a high-quality service for transmission and playing real-time voice conversations (voice streaming) over wireless ad-hoc networks is no mean feat. buffering together with adjusting the playout time of the packets is a receiver-side solution to overcome this challenge. in this paper, a new adaptive playout adjustment algorithm is proposed to stream the voice conversations over wireless...

BACKGROUND Residents are commonly involved in establishing goals of care for hospitalized patients. While education can improve the quality of these conversations, whether and how postgraduate training programs integrate such teaching into their curricula is not well established. The objective of this study was to characterize perceptions of current teaching and assessment of goals of care conv...

BACKGROUND Inadequate handover in emergency care is a threat to patient safety. Handover across care boundaries poses particular problems due to different professional, organisational and cultural backgrounds. While there have been many suggestions for standardisation of handover content, relatively little is known about the verbal behaviours that shape handover conversations. This paper explor...

Visual methods serve a unique purpose in that they help generate data that uncover experiences, knowledge, and contextual factors that lead to a greater shared understanding about a topic. We describe the process and results of one American Indian community-based organization's success using visual methods to prompt community conversations about mental health and substance abuse. We uncovered c...