Human Computer Interaction

Human Computer Interaction


Human Computer Interaction (HCI) lies at the heart of imagining the future of interactive systems and making sure they are useful and usable when developed. From its original focus on usability engineering methods, HCI has evolved into a vibrant multidisciplinary area of research and practice. Research in HCI has become a key driver in understanding how people, work practices, business value, and technologies interact. Some of our highlighted research includes:

  • BlueSpace: BlueSpace is a next-generation prototype workspace with the goal of increasing knowledge workers' productivity by deterring unwanted interruptions and improving team awareness and communications. It also provides users with greater control over their environment by allowing them to personalize their environmental settings. There are several cornerstone technologies and applications that BlueSpace utilizes to achieve these goals. One of these is the myTeam application which combines sensor data with user input to provide availability awareness to registered team members. Another is the Everywhere Displays projector that creates interactive displays on walls and tables, allowing users to quickly reconfigure their workspace to support working with colleagues.
  • Community Research: Our community research program explores how emerging technologies may provide new business opportunities for IBM products, in support of workplace communities for communities of practice and geographical communities. We have also performed detailed analyses of the business costs and opportunities of communities of practice.
  • Reinventing Email (ReMail): Electronic mail is the most widely used business productivity application. Though email usage has changed, our email clients largely have not. People are increasingly frustrated by their email, overwhelmed by the volume, losing important items, and feeling pressure to respond quickly. The ReMail project investigates how people use email and how we might design and build better email systems.
  • The MoMail project reinvents mobile email to support the way users really work with email. A key design approach in MoMail is to enable users to perform most email management functions directly within the inbox screen. This is accomplished through gestural menus, thread highlighting, and one-liner previews.
  • Loops is a web-based "persistent chat" system that allows members of a distributed workgroup to collaborate synchronously and asynchronously, with participants being able to see who is (or was) present and what has happened recently. Loops (and its predecessor, Babble) makes use of social proxies, minimalist graphical visualizations of the presence and activities of people participating in a Loop.
  • Research for Consulting and Services Businesses: Historically, IBM Research has focused its efforts on science and engineering relevant to the hardware and software businesses, such as physics related to magnetic storage and computational theory related to encryption algorithms. With the growth of IGS, we now have the opportunity to direct research toward IBM's consulting business.
  • ReachOut: ReachOut is a methodology and a chat-based tool for peer support and community building. It offers new methods for handling such problems as locating, selecting, and approaching the right set of potential advisors. ReachOut bridges the gap between newsgroups and real time synchronous chats. It takes the best of both options, and adds push technology to portray new, by-topic awareness and mid-level persistency.
  • Web Accessibility: Despite accessibility standards for the web, many pages remain difficult to use. This project investigates a method of making web pages accessible without requiring the use of assistive technologies. A standard browser, provides the ability for users to access web pages reformatted in the manner most usable by them.

IBM is a leading center for human-computer interaction (HCI). From the development of enabling technologies, such as speech recognition, to cutting-edge interaction design, IBM's HCI research spans more than a quarter of a century. Drawing on such disciplines as anthropology, computer science, psychology, and sociology, as well as visual and industrial design, HCI work is carried out in contexts ranging from laboratories to on-site collaborations with customers.

Some of IBM Research's many critical contributions in these areas include:
IBM researchers have been, and continue to be, among the worldwide leaders in human computer interaction. Being part of IBM gives us rare opportunities to have our research affect both the state-of-the-art and the state-of-the-practice. We advance the state-of-the-art by publishing in leading journals and conferences, engaging in active participation in professional organizations, producing numerous patents, and collaborating with researchers from top-ranked academic institutions. We affect the state of the practice through significant engagements, both with business units that make up IBM, and also with key IBM customers.


David R. Millen , Michael A. Fontaine , Michael J. Muller, Supporting community and building social capital: Understanding the benefit and costs of communities of practice, Communications of the ACM April 2002 Volume 45 Issue 4.

Erickson, T., Kellogg, W.A. "Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Mesh with Social Processes." In Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. Vol. 7, No. 1, pp 59-83. New York: ACM Press, 2000.

J. Lai, A. Levas, P. Chou, C. Pinhanez, M. Viveros, BlueSpace: Personalizing Workspace through Awareness and Adaptability, International Journal of Human Computer Studies, December 2002
Ribak, A., Jacovi, M., and Soroka, V. (2002): ‘"Ask before you search": peer support and community building with ReachOut". Proceedings ACM Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2002), New Orleans, LA, 2002.

Zhai, S., Hunter, M., Smith, B.A., Performance Optimization of Virtual Keyboards,  Human-Computer Interaction. Vol. 17, No2&3. 2002.  pp 229-269.

News:
Web Adaptation Technology Named "Product of the Year" by NBDC
The National Business & Disability Council (NBDC) named IBM's Web Adaptation Technology "Product of the Year" for 2002. NBDC is the leading resource for employers seeking to integrate people with disabilities into the workplace and for companies seeking to reach people with disabilities in the consumer marketplace. The award will be presented at the NBDC annual conference in Atlanta in April. The Web Adaptation Technology, made available to several IBM Corporate Community Relations nonprofit partners in October, 2002, makes the Web more accessible to persons with vision and motor limitations. Developed by Research, this software provides a simple and uniform means for selecting and applying transformations of Web content according to individual preferences. For example, changes in font size and style, inter-letter spacing, and color contrast are used to increase legibility, and text can be supplemented with speech output. In addition, banner text, image enlargement and enhancement, and page magnification are other options for users with more severe visual impairments.

Recent Accomplishments
Irene Greif inducted into the Women in Technology International (WITI) Hall of Fame

Paul Moody is general co-chair and Dan Gruen technical program co-chair of ACM's Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) 2004.

Paul Moody co-editor of Human-Computer Interaction special issue on Revisiting and Reinventing Email (in press).

Shari Trewin, Member of INCITS V2 Standards committee.

Tom Erickson served as Papers Co-Chair for ACM CHI 2003

Vicki L. Hanson, Chair, Assets 2002 (ACM SIGCAPH Conference on Assistive Technologies)

Vicki L. Hanson, Vice-Chair, ACM SIGCAPH (Computers and the Physically Handicapped)

Wendy A. Kellogg, Member of National Academy of Sciences Computer Science and Telecommunications Board

Wendy A. Kellogg, Fellow of ACM

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Reinventing Mobile Email

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From the MoMail in-box, users can preview email, see threads, and perform tasks from a gestural menu without changing screens.