Reciprocal undo in collaborative text editing”

Proposal for an internship for 2^nd year Master students

Topic of the internship: Reciprocal undo in collaborative text editing

Context: This research internship will take place in the Human Interaction department of the LISN (Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Numerical Sciences) in University Paris-Saclay. The AMIArchitectures et modèles pour l'Interaction (Architectures and Models for Interaction) and ExSitu (EXtreme Situated Interaction) groups of the Human Interaction department are collaborating on this project.

Supervisors:

Ouriel Grynszpan, Professor, AMIArchitectures et modèles pour l'Interaction group, https://www.lisn.upsaclay.fr/members/grynszpan-ouriel/,
Email: ouriel.grynszpan@universite-paris-saclay.fr

Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, Professor, ExSitu group, https://www.lri.fr/~mbl/
Email : michel.beaudouin-lafon@universite-paris-saclay.fr

Desirable profile:

• Student in Master 2^nd year in Human-Computer Interaction.
• Knowledge of experimental methodologies and statistics will be appreciated.
• Other types of profiles may be considered depending on skills.

To apply: Send by mail to Ouriel Grynszpan & Michel Beaudouin-Lafon: CV, cover letter and available transcripts of grades (Master and Bachelor)

Duration of internship: 5 months (between March and July 2025), this internship will be paid.

Project description: The undo functionality is pivotal to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Its theoretical underpinnings have been thoroughly studied and different approaches have been proposed to tackle its technical limitations (Nancel & Cockburn, 2014). This functionality becomes even more challenging in groupware settings where different users are involved in a common task. A typical example is collaborative editing, which enables two or more users to work together on a common text document. Although technical limitations are well known, the human experience of collaborative text editing has not been scrutinized to the same extent. The present project seeks to investigate a collaborative undo functionality that empowers collaborating users to undo a previous command either produced by themselves or their partners. This functionality entails reciprocal control by oneself and the partners on each other’s actions. As such, it may presumably foster a sense of joint agency, that is, a sense of responsibility and control for the effect of joint actions. The sense of joint agency currently yields heated debates in the cognitive science community (Loehr, 2022) and has been shown to be critically modulated in human-machine contexts (Grynszpan et al., 2019). The goal of the present internship is to devise a human-computer interface approach that facilitates reciprocal undo by multiple users in text editing and assess its impact on the sense of joint agency.

References:

Grynszpan, O., Sahaï, A., Hamidi, N., Pacherie, E., Berberian, B., Roche, L., & Saint-Bauzel, L. (2019). The sense of agency in human-human vs human-robot joint action. Consciousness and Cognition, 75, 102820. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2019.102820

Loehr, J. D. (2022). The sense of agency in joint action : An integrative review. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-021-02051-3

Nancel, M., & Cockburn, A. (2014). Causality : A conceptual model of interaction history. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1777‑1786. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2556990