Headline USA Today, April 24, 1997, "Technology is 'demolishing' time, distance." Headlines like this are becoming the norm today. There is little doubt that continued progress in many human endeavors will require the collaboration of individuals working together in teams, workgroups, or collaboratories. When a task's complexity removes it from the province of one person to distribution over multiple natural and artificial intelligences, the system changes quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitatively, the system is more complex, more dynamic. This complexity increases further as the constituent intelligences are separated in time (asynchronous communication) or in space (synchronous communication). Qualitatively, the system exhibits properties that were not evident when a lone individual is working on a set of tasks. Expansions in communication technologies have allowed increasing numbers of work teams to collaborate across time and space. Distributing team members in this way has raised a number of important research questions for scholars. The HTIC is concerned with issues related to computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), as most distributed teams rely on some form of computer communication technology to make their work possible. The general goal of all research programs in this area of the center is to develop interdisciplinary collaborations to study the impact of communication technologies on both team process and performance.