IBM Watson Research Center

Collaborative User Experience The Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Research group spans the Cambridge and Hawthorne research sites, drawing on CSCW, CHI, and accessibility 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 Wendy Kellogg, David R Millen, John Patterson, and Martin Wattenberg.   Collaborative User Experience Projects Currently CUE is focusing on the interrelated themes of Social Software, Collaboration Environments, Interactive Visualization, and Accessibility. 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. Collaboration Environments Our broadest 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 continues to focus on supporting a group of people that is collecting, understanding and jointly reasoning about incoming information and making important business decisions. In our work on Collaborative Development Environments (CDEs), we support the social nature of software development by ensuring that the people who design, produce, and maintain software can be aware of each others' activities and communicate easily about them. The Bluegrass research project and several new games that use 3D virtual worlds to foster teambuilding exemplify this thrust. 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. Accessibility Research Our goal in Accessibility Research is to provide innovative technological advances that will help eliminate barriers encountered by persons having limited sensory, physical, or cognitive abilities. We address these issues in terms of access to technology and in terms of technological solutions to education and other life activities. Current work includes accessible virtual worlds, technologies for a maturing workforce, extensions that change Web pages "on the fly" to meet individual users' needs, and enhancements to keyboards and other input devices.