Dr. Saeko Nomura's primary interest is studying technology's emerging role within collaborative work environments. She seeks to understand the relationship between humans and technology in order to enable the design of better workplace environments in which people can more effectively harness the elements of the social and material world.

Most recently, she has worked as an ethnographer based at UCSD studying Boeing's flight operations and training program for Non-US commercial airlines. Throughout the course of this project, she conducted a series of field research studies in Japan, New Zealand, and the US. As an observer of pilot/technology interactions, she flew several flight segments sitting in the cockpit of commercial airplanes or videotaped pilots flying in full-motion simulators. Observations which were subsequently developed through interviews with the pilots. Research results of her analysis were presented at various international conferences such as ACM CSCW.

Saeko received her Ph.D. in Informatics from Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Japan in 2003.

Recent Publications

Nomura, S. and Hutchins, E. (2007). The Multimodal Production of Common Ground Understandings in Intercultural Flight Training. In Proc. of the 14th International Symposium on Aviation Psychology (ISAP 2007), 475-480.

Nomura, S. and Hutchins, E. (2006). Study for Bridging between Paper and Digital Representations in the Flight Deck. In Proc. of Collaborating over Paper and Digital Documents Workshop (CoPADD 2006), pp. 21-24.

Nomura, S., Hutchins, E. and Holder, B. (2006). The Uses of Paper in Commercial Airline Flight Operations, In Proc. of Computer Supported Cooperative Work 2006 (CSCW 2006), 249-258. [Acceptance rate 22%]

Hutchins, E., Nomura, S., and Holder, B. (2006). The Ecology of Language Practices in Worldwide Airline Flight Deck Operations. In Proc. of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2006), 363-368. [Acceptance rate 26%]

Nomura, S., Tamura, H., and Jim Hollan, J. (2005). Information Management Centers in Everyday Home Life. In Proc. of the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCII2005).