SHARE Lab

Management Science and Engineering, University of Waterloo.

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Carl A. Pollock Hall

200 University Ave W

Waterloo, ON

The SHARE Lab (Social and Human-centered AI for Reimagined Engagement) at the University of Waterloo is led by Prof. Sharon Ferguson, and focuses on enabling successful human-human collaboration through thoughtful technology design. We conduct research at the intersection of the Future of Work, Human-AI Interaction, and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.

Prof. Ferguson an Assistant Professor of Management Science and Engineering at the University of Waterloo, and is associated with the Future of Work Institute, the Games Institute and the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. She completed her Bachelors and PhD in Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto, supervised by Dr. Alison Olechowski.

We are always looking for enthusiastic students to join our lab! If you are interested, please fill out the interest form.

Areas of Interest Human-Computer Interaction | Flexible Working Practices | Collaboration and Teamwork | Collaboration Technology | Enterprise Communication Platforms | Artificial Intelligence | Engineering Education

SHARE Lab big picture SHARE Lab big picture 2

news

May 01, 2026 Our lab doubled in size in May! Keenan Ung and Kate Percy-Robb are joining Zayn and Sofiia as MASc students
Apr 30, 2026 Kate presented her work on defining conceptions of AI careers at the 2026 University of Waterloo Teaching and Learning Conference.
Apr 25, 2026 MASc student Sofiia was accepted to the prestigous Global Connect Fellowship at NTU Singapore!
Apr 20, 2026 Devon’s and Ryan’s co-first-authored paper “Informing Group Informatics System Design: Balancing the Benefits and Concerns of Data-Driven Collaboration Feedback” has been accepted at CHIWORK 2026! Sharon will be in Linz, Austria to present in June 2026, and in her role as the Accessibility/Diversity co-chair.
Mar 30, 2026 Sharon received funding through the University of Waterloo Global Futures Fund and the Future of Work Insitute for projects relating to AI use and team cohesion (in collaboration with Dr. Sharlene He and Dr. Kim de Laat); AI use and team creativity (in collaboration with Dr. Sharlene He and Dr. Ramona Bobocel); AI-enabled policing technologies and discretion (in collaboration with Dr. Ada Hurst and Dr. Holly Campeau); AI-supported reflection grading (in collaboration with Dr. Sharlene He, Dr. Andrea Prier and Robin Andrade), and building social fitness when returning from remote and hybrid work (in collaboration with Dr. Troy Glover, Dr. Edith Law, Dr. Ramona Bobocel and Dr. Katie Plaisance).
Mar 15, 2026 Sharon received a Graham Seed Fund award for the project entitled A socio-technical readiness framework for AI-driven data capture and workflow analysis in procedural community care settings: The case of AFib Ablation” in collaboration with Dr. Ada Hurst, Dr. Houra Mahmoudzadeh, Dr. William Chan and the Waterloo Regional Health Network.
Mar 08, 2026 Sharon was invited to speak on a Women in Academia panel at the 2026 International Women’s Day Gala at the University of Toronto.
Oct 12, 2025 Sharon will be at CSCW 2025 in Bergen, Norway supporting the presentation of Marjan’s work: Two Sides to Every Story: Exploring Hybrid Design Teams’ Perceptions of Psychological Safety on Slack
Jul 15, 2025 Sharon received a Learning Innovation and Teaching Enhancement (LITE) Seed Grant from the University of Waterloo to continue investigating student persistence in Artificial Intelligence.
May 26, 2025 In collaboration with Dr. Anastasia Kuzminykh and Paula Akemi Aoyagui, Sharon led a workshop entitled ``The Role of AI-Empowered Machine Subjectivity in HCI Tasks’’ at the 2025 Graphics Interface Conference in Kelowna, BC.

selected publications

  1. No risk, no reward: Towards an automated measure of psychological safety from online communication
    Sharon A Ferguson, Georgia Zande, and Alison Olechowski
    In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2024
  2. Circle Back Next Week: The Effect of Meeting-Free Weeks on Distributed Workers’ Unstructured Time and Attention Negotiation
    Sharon A Ferguson and Michael Massimi
    In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2024
  3. Something borrowed: exploring the influence of AI-generated explanation text on the composition of human explanations
    Sharon A Ferguson, Paula Akemi Aoyagui, and Anastasia Kuzminykh
    In Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2023
  4. Are We Equal Online?: An Investigation of Gendered Language Patterns and Message Engagement on Enterprise Communication Platforms
    Sharon A Ferguson and Alison Olechowski
    Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2023