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Computer Science
User Experience
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The User Sciences & Experience Research (USER) group at IBM Research - Almaden focuses on understanding and improving how people interact with technology. Our goal is to improve the ease-of-use of existing products and explore new paradigms in using computers.
Building a good user experience is a systems problem that we explore from many perspectives. To understand the issues, we study users in the field and spend time with customers. We design, build, and evaluate technologies, prototypes, and systems that improve people's experiences with technology. The systems we work on range in size from small memory cards to large corporate IT systems. We focus on issues that effect the user's experience: performance, security, usability, design, and more.
Our cross-disciplinary team includes human computer interaction (HCI) and human factors researchers, software engineers, computer security experts, cognitive and social computing scientists, user interface designers, and user study analysts.
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We are now recruiting interns for summer for 2010. How to apply.
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Our Activity Centric Collaboration (ACC) program is defining a new organizing paradigm that support collaborative work around purposeful activities. We have created a computational construct, called an Activity, its representation, architecture, and user experience that has already led to a Lotus product and been deployed internally within IBM. Now, we are creating research prototypes to explore several new directions that utilize an ACC back-end service to give activity support to common tools:
- Understanding collaboration needs of different types of teams in the enterprise, including communities, project teams, sub-groups, and more.
- Providing tacit support for activities in email threads.
- Enabling users to easily create spatial layouts of activity-centered content, to enhance their ability to understand and contribute to a shared activity representation.
- Enabling personal task management across multiple devices, tools, and collaborative activities.
Team: Tom Moran, Barton Smith, Jalal Mahmud, Tara Matthews, Eser Kandogan, Tessa Lau, Jeffrey Pierce, Steve Whittaker
Contact: Tara Matthews (tara at almaden.ibm.com)
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The Extreme Science Program is an NSF funded hands-on after-school science enrichment program to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and engineering. Workshops and classes include electronics, web page design, robotics, rocketry, solar energy, animation, kitchen chemistry, microbiology, forensics, automotive, and holistic health. The program is piloted at the Latino College Preparatory Academy (LCPA) in East San Jose, a charter public high school designed to encourage low-income Latino students to attend college and attain proficiency in English, Spanish and computers. Extreme activities are designed to show that science is exciting and includes scuba diving, kayaking and indoor sky diving. The program has attracted scientists and engineers from NASA Ames, Lockheed Martin, San Jose State University and the United States Geological Survey.
For more information: http://lcpa-extreme-science.com/
Team: Tom Zimmerman (IBM Research-Almaden), Dr. David Johnson (National Hispanic University), Cynthia Wambsgans (National Hispanic University)
Contact: Tom Zimmerman (tzim at almaden.ibm.com)
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Known as "touchtone hell", voice menu navigation has long been recognized as a frustrating user experience due to the sequential nature of voice presentation. FonePal fundamentally changes the caller experience by augmenting traditional voice menu navigation with graphical and text information that automatically displays on the caller's computer screen. FonePal uses the Internet infrastructure, specifically Instant Messaging, to deliver a visual menu and information that may help to solve the caller's problem.
Team: Shumin Zhai, Jeff Pierce, John Barton
Contact: Shumin Zhai (zhai at almaden.ibm.com)
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Highlight allows end-users to create mobile applications from existing web sites and deploy those applications to mobile devices. Highlight's design, which incorporates a fully-functional modern web browser as part of its server-side infrastructure, allows existing sites that contain substantial client-side JavaScript or Ajax technology to be modified for use on mobile devices.
Contact: Jeffrey Nichols (jwnichols at us.ibm.com)
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As the proliferation of mobile devices puts the Internet in everyone's pocket, the potential applications of mobile crowdsourcing have exploded. Urban 311 services, tracking of congestion, air quality, carbon footprints, and wildlife diversity are just a few example applications of this kind of technology. In a joint research project with Stanford University, we're exploring interfaces for creating generic services, data capture on mobile devices, data aggregation and collaborative analysis, and interfaces for mobile data visualization. Our goal is to build a general infrastructure that allows the building of arbitrary capture and analysis services, putting collaborative business intelligence on top of mobile crowdsourcing.
Team: Jeff Pierce, Christine Robson, Jeff Heer (Stanford)
Contact: Christine Robson (crobson at us.ibm.com)
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The model of the single personal computer is outdated; users instead increasingly employ a heterogeneous collection of computing devices, such as desktops, laptops, tablets, PDAs, and mobile phones. Despite that trend, the user experiences we create still largely presume the use of just a single computer. We need to rethink the way we create new applications and interfaces to better reflect what users are actually doing. Toward that end, we are developing a prototype Personal Information Environments infrastructure that simplifies exploring the design space for services that span multiple personal devices. We have developed a variety of services that demonstrate the capabilities of our infrastructure.
See also http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/projects/pie/
Contact: Jeff Pierce (jspierce at us.ibm.com)
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The web has become the platform of choice for new applications. The Smarter Web project aims to develop tools for users and developers to improve user experience on the web. How do we make it easier for designers and developers to create, debug, and test web applications? How do we design and deploy tools that enable end users to increase their productivity while using web applications, through automating repetitive tasks, or reusing their knowledge of how to do tasks? Our team combines expertise in HCI, programming languages, machine learning, and open source to create technology that makes the web easier to use.
Team: John Barton, Mike Collins, Allen Cypher, Clemens Drews, Tessa Lau, Jalal Mahmud
Contact: Tessa Lau (tessalau at us.ibm.com)
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We are exploring the use of social and collaboration software within the enterprise, including email, social networks, microblogging, and contact management.
- Bridging the gap between email and social software: Exploring topics such as social features (like tagging and profiles) in email, attention management, and bringing email into social applications.
- Collaboration context: Using social and other cues to bring a context around a current piece of work, making it easier to find related information when you're working on something.
- Awareness: Using microblogging and automatic updates to improve general awareness of what your colleagues are working on.
- Unified contact management: Exploring how people can keep their social network intact between applications and how people work with groups.
- Cloud-based collaboration storage: Using a Cassandra-based cloud to provide a scalable backend for email, feeds, and other collaborations.
Team: Stephen Dill, Eric Wilcox, Jan Pieper, Jerre Schoudt, Julia Grace, Julian Cerruti, Sandra Yuen
Contact: Stephen Dill (dill at us.ibm.com)
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Computer system administrators are the unsung heroes of the information age, working behind the scenes to configure, maintain, and troubleshoot the computer infrastructure that underlies much of modern life. However, little can be found in the literature about the practices and problems of these highly specialized computer users. Through a series of field studies in large corporate data centers, observing organizations, work practices, tools, and problem-solving strategies of system administrators, we observed that modern IT systems are extremely complex and a single individual cannot manage the complexity of such systems. Though organizations, methods, and tools are often put in place to reduce complexity in IT management, we found that imposing top-down structure in organizations, methods, and tools can only trail innovation in IT systems. We argue that real productivity gains can only be obtained when individuals can invent their own methods and tools for managing IT complexity and when these methods and tools are adopted by local teams and by larger organizations. Based on these findings, we are exploring new tools and features to improve administrators' ability to collaboratively manage complex systems.
Team: Eser Kandogan, Eben Haber, John Bailey, Paul Maglio, Tara Matthews, Andreas Dieberger
Contact: Eben Haber (ehaber at us.ibm.com)
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A new wave of touchscreen devices, from mobile phones to kiosks, is rapidly changing the way people interact with information. Gesture interaction is key to ease of use and efficiency. This project explores the fundamentals of touch screen gesture interaction, including
Contact: Shumin Zhai (zhai at almaden.ibm.com)
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Many business applications would be better served with customized results, such as personalized search results during search, selective sharing of information with people, and people, tools and content recommended for individual users. To better serve individual needs, we are developing a unified framework that dynamically builds a profile that reflects an individual's or a team's communication and collaboration practices. The profile includes individual/team interests, skills, preferred tools, membership in shared online spaces, and more. We are working on algorithms and tools that can interactively and automatically build such a individual or team profile from various sources (including socio-collaborative tools) and automatically update the profile based on user feedback.
Team: Hongxia Jin, Stephen Whittaker, Qihua Wang
Contact: Hongxia Jin (jin at us.ibm.com)
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