Principal Software Engineer
Contact: beth_brownholtz@us.ibm.com
Research Interests:
Web 2.0 on the desktop and the web
Semantic Web
Attention Management
Software Patterns
Currently, Beth is a research developer working on the Beehive project, an internal social networking site for the enterprise. Before that, Beth worked on Malibu project. Malibu is a personal productivity assistant that provides peripheral access to and awareness of activities, tasks, social-bookmarks, and feeds to assist knowledge workers in their activity-centric work. Malibu, running on the desktop, demonstrates the power of Web 2.0 beyond the browser.
Prior projects include PestoPlus, a framework for augmenting real-time collaborative applications with services such as content record and playback, text translation and speech transcription. Developed jointly with researchers in the Haifa Labs, Pesto allowed end users the control to dynamically manage services, enabling for example, the means to add text translation on the fly into an Instant Messaging (chat) session.
Beth was a key contributor to the Activity Explorer (AE) project. Activity Explorer is a novel hybrid productivity application that combines informal, ad hoc communication with formal, more structured collaboration tools. The two key ingredients of Activity Explorer are Live Shared Objects and Activities. After helping to develop the original research prototype, Beth joined researcher Werner Geyer in a tech transfer effort, bringing Activity Explorer into IBM Workplace. AE provides the foundation for IBM's next generation of activity-centric collaboration products.
Beth joined Research in June 2000, originally as a member of the Cambridge Speech Initiative (CSI) Group. CSI was an effort to extend the user's experience of traditional speech recognition interfaces with a more natural, expansive conversational interface. In Beth's former work at Lotus, she participated for many years as a developer and team leader on the 1-2-3 team. As a contributor to several releases of Lotus 1-2-3, she gained not only technical expertise, but equally valuable insights into the art of building and rebuilding teams, decision-making processes and styles, and the realities of business constraints. While working on 1-2-3, Beth focused on the collaborative use of spreadsheets, most notably through such features as Version Manager, Version Manager for Notes, and TeamConsolidate.
Prior to joining Lotus in 1991, Beth was part of a team that developed a next-generation, distributed newspaper publishing system at Atex in Bedford, MA. She began her Software Engineering career at Wang Laboratories in Lowell, MA as a member of the word processing development team.
Beth holds a BS in Computer Science from Rutgers University.
Projects:
Malibu
PestoPlus
Activity Explorer
Publications:
Geyer, W., Muller, M.J., Moore, M., Wilcox, E., Cheng, L., Brownholtz, B., Hill, C.R., Millen, D.R., “ActivityExplorer: Activity-Centric Collaboration from Research to Product,” IBM Systems Journal – Special Issue on Business Collaboration, Volume 45, Number 4, Nov/Dec 2006
Sen, S., Geyer, W., Muller, M., Moore, M., Brownholtz, B. Wilcox, E., D.R. Millen, “FeedMe – A Collaborative Alert Filtering System,” Proc ACM CSCW 2006.
Roberto S. Silva, R.S, Geyer, W., Brownholtz, E.A., Redmiles, D., "Understanding the Trade-offs of Blending Collaboration Services in Support of Contextual Collaboration," in: Proc CRIWG 2006, 12th International Workshop on Groupware, Medina del Campo, Valladolid, Spain, September 2006.
Muller, Michael J., Minassian, Suzanne O., Geyer, Werner, Millen, David R, Brownholtz, Elizabeth, and Wilcox, Eric, “Studying Appropriation in Activity-Centric Collaboration,” position paper at ECSCW 2005 workshop on “Supporting Articulation Work: Approaches for the reflective user”. In: International Reports on Socio-Informatics, Volume 2, Issue 2, 2005, IISI – International Institute for Socio-Informatics.
Millen, David R, Muller, Michael J., Geyer, Werner, Wilcox, Eric, and Brownholtz ,Beth, “Patterns of Media Use in an Activity-Centric Collaborative Environment,” in: Proc. ACM CHI 2005, Portland, OR, April 2005.
TR 2004.13 : Chat Spaces (DIS 2004)
TR 2004.02 : One-Hundred Days in an Activity-Centric Collaboration Environment based on Shared Objects (CHI 2004)
B. Brownholtz, W. Geyer, M. Muller, E. Wilcox, D. R. Millen, Explorations in an Activity-Centric Collaboration Environment CHI 2004. Vienna Austria, April 2004.
TR 2004.01 : Principles and Architecture for a Conversational Agent
Ross, S., Brownholtz E, Armes, R. A Multiple-Application Conversational Agent. Proceedings of IUI 2004. Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, January 2004.
| Ross, S., Brownholtz E, Armes, R. Voice User Interface Principles for a Conversational Agent. Proceedings of IUI 2004. Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, January 2004. |