IBM Watson Research Center

Collaborative User Experience The Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Research group spans the Cambridge and Hawthorne research sites, drawing on CSCW and CHI leaders to focus on the social and technical underpinnings of successful and inclusive business collaboration. The group is directed by Irene Greif a founder of the Computer-Supported Cooperative Research field, and includes teams led by David R Millen, John Patterson, and Martin Wattenberg.   Collaborative User Experience Projects Currently CUE is focusing on the interrelated themes of Social Software, Collaborative Environments, and Interactive Visualization. Social Software We are exploring new collaboration software that builds on underlying social networks to provide powerful new ways to find people, groups, and manage information. Several projects are underway, including Beehive, a social networking site designed to help employees connect, team build, and learn about each other. The Social Lenses project provides views into organizational processes that influence group behavior and enhance execution. Another project, SmallBlue, allows users to discover the hidden connections that are important for sharing information, decision-making, and innovation within organizations. Cattail leverages the Web to provide an easy-to-use personal file sharing system. Collaborative Environments Our goal is to invent new collaboration software by designing and building applications to support work in both small groups and large organizations. The Collaborative Reasoning project focuses on supporting a group of people that is collecting, understanding and jointly reasoning about incoming information. The current use case for this work is detecting computer and network intrusions. In our work on Bluegrass and, more recently, Olympus, we have been trying to understand the business value of virtual worlds and avatars. In Olympus, a simple Flash-based virtual world is used in conjunction with the Unyte eMeeting service. In 2009, we will be investigating whether and how this new feature affects the eMeeting experience. Finally, the Ensemble project is applying social networking concepts to application development. Interactive Visualization Interactive visualizations help people see and exchange information in novel ways. Many Eyes exemplifies our design goal of transforming visualization from a solitary activity into a collaborative one. Other application areas are on-line discussions, email archives, social networks, software development, and executive decision support tools.