Wendy A. Kellogg

IBM · Social and Cognitive Computing

A method and system for harvesting collaboration data in accordance with a privacy policy is provided. In one embodiment, the method comprises defining a privacy policy for collaboration data, said privacy policy including a list of fields associated with the collaboration data to be harvested; harvesting the collaboration data associated with the...

A voice tagging system includes a client computing device that includes a media object capture device and a voice capture device and runs a client application that associates media objects to voice samples. The system also includes a communications network coupled to the client computing device, a voice tagging system coupled to the communications...

Medical research suggests that avoiding lengthy periods of physical inactivity can have significant health benefits. The pervasive nature of mobile phones increasingly allows individuals to track and measure their own physical activity thus creating opportunities for them to reflect on their behavior and make informed changes. In this work, we inve...

In the human–computer interaction, computer supported cooperative work, and ubiquitous computing literature, making people’s presence and activities visible as a design approach has been extensively explored to enhance computer-mediated interactions and collaborations. This process has developed under the rubrics of “awareness,” “social translucenc...

Mobile communication is a key enabler for economic, social, and political change in developing regions of the world. This paper describes IBM Picture Discussions, which is a mobile social computing application framework designed to facilitate local information sharing in regions with sparse Internet connectivity, low literacy rates, and having user...

Mobile communication is a key enabler for economic, social and political change in developing regions of the world. Today's internet-enabled, multimedia, and touch-screen mobile smartphones could become the future platform for delivering information and communication technology (ICT) to these regions. We describe Picture Talk, a smartphone applicat...

This paper presents the first in-depth evaluation of a large multi-format virtual conference. The conference took place in an avatar-based D virtual world with spatialized audio, and had keynote, poster and social sessions. We studied it by drawing on logs, a survey and interviews with 30 participants. We develop a model - Coalescence, Focused Inte...

Virtual worlds can allow conversational participants to achieve common ground in situations where the information volume and need for clarification is low. We argue in favor of this assertion through an examination of a semi-structured activity among hundreds of users held in a virtual world. Through the idea of 'implicit grounding', we argue that...

Today, commodity technologies like mobile phones - once symbols of status and wealth - have become deeply woven into social and economic participation in Western society. Despite the pervasiveness of these technologies, there remain groups who may not have extensive access to them but who are nonetheless deeply affected by their presence in everyda...

vSked is an interactive and collaborative assistive technology for students with autism, combining visual schedules, choice boards, and a token-based reward system into an integrated classroom system. In this paper, we present the results of a study ...

Virtual worlds can allow conversational participants to achieve common ground in situations where the information volume and need for clarification is low. We argue in favor of this assertion through an examination of a semi-structured activity among hundreds of users held in a virtual world. Through the idea of implicit grounding, we argue that th...

Uganda suffers from a severe shortage of professional healthcare workers. Thus, programs aimed at prevention of disease are an important complement to the limited healthcare delivery system. We analyze two deployments of an SMS-based HIV/AIDS education system that uses a quiz format to assess people's knowledge of the disease, including its causes...

Computer scientists are working with biomedical researchers, policy specialists, and medical practitioners to usher in a new era in healthcare. A recently convened panel of experts considered various research opportunities for technology-mediated social participation in Health 2.0.

Despite advances in collaboration software, globally dis-tributed teams face significant challenges, including varia-tions in communication style, work behaviors, expectations and establishing common ground. Virtual worlds allow distributed team members to inhabit a shared space and to engage in cooperative activities. We report an exploratory stud...

The design and use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has now evolved beyond its workplace origins to the wider public, expanding to people who live at the margins of contemporary society. Through field work and participatory co-design with homeless shelter residents and care providers we have explored design at the common boundary o...

Mobile communication is a key enabler for economic, social, and political change in developing regions of the world. This paper describes IBM Picture Discussions, which is a mobile social computing application framework designed to facilitate local information sharing in regions with sparse Internet connectivity, low literacy rates, and having user...

The current surge of interest in virtual worlds suggests they are poised to make an evolutionary leap to the workplace, as instant messaging did a decade ago. In recent work we have introduced dozens of new users to teambuilding activities in the Second Life® environment, meeting both enthusiasm and skepticism. We document five issues for professio...

Organizational processes often take place over long periods of time and require intermittent attention. Remembering and reasoning about upcoming process tasks is important, but not adequately supported by existing tools. This paper describes Longitude, a tool that provides a compact timeline of tasks and deadlines. We discuss findings from an explo...

Assistance - work carried out by one entity in support of another - is a concept of long-standing interest, both as a type of human work common in organizations and as a model of how computational systems might interact with humans. Surprisingly, the perhaps most paradigmatic form of assistance - the work of administrative assistants or secretaries...

Distributed teams are increasingly common in today' s workplace. For these teams, face-to-face meetings where members can most easily build trust are rare and of ten cost- prohibitive. 3D virtual worlds and games may provid e an alternate means for encouraging team development due to their affordances for facile communication, emotional engagement,...

This chapter discusses, as an example of a resource in use, the Zephyr Help Instance as used at MIT. The Zephyr Help Instance is a chat-like system that allows users to ask questions and other users to answer. The Zephyr Help Instance has the social and technical affordances for continued use as socio-technical system in its environment of use and...

Interactive information systems must not only encode information internally but must also produce externally visible representations, which may be inscribed into various forms, including visual and paper artifacts. In looking at visual information, many investigators have noted the relationship between representational forms and practice; maps, for...

This research examines how representational gestures (Kita 2000), made by scientists during collaborative discussion in a biochemistry lab, are used in formulating scientific theory. By analyzing digital video of lab meetings and interviews, we find that representational gestures are frequently used to reference, modify, and embody portions of exis...

In this chapter, we describe the genesis and use of an artifact that became a resource for a wide range of activities. We discuss how the creation and use of the rush cheat sheet (RCS) and its associated representations at the Dallas-Ft. Worth TRACON (Tower Radar Approach Control) brought together information and expert knowledge across organizatio...

This paper calls for a respecification of IT systems design and development practice as co-realization. Co-realization is an orientation to technology production that develops out of a principled synthesis of ethnomethodology and participatory design. It moves the locus of design and development activities into workplace settings where technologies...

As both technologies and organizations undergo dramatic changes in form and function, organizational researchers are increasingly turning to concepts of innovation, emergence, and improvisation to help explain the new ways of organizing and using technology evident in practice. With a similar intent, I propose an extension to the structurational pe...

In large organizations, people often take part in processes in which they have no prior experience. In such situations a common problem is figuring out how to begin, and a common solution is the simple expedient of talking to others who have more expertise. However, in large distributed organizations, this expedient is often not so simple. In this...

Troubleshooting large computer systems is often highly collaborative. Because these systems consist of complex infrastructures with many interdependent components, expertise is spread across people and organizations. Those who administer such systems are faced with cognitive and social challenges, including the establishment of common ground and co...

We present a case study of a project to introduce a new organization-wide, integrated information system within the UK healthcare sector that we conducted as part of a wider, socio-technical exploration of factors influencing the dependability of computer-based systems. We report in detail on the problems of working with and evolving a standardized...

How do software and other technical systems come to be adopted and used? People use software and other technical systems in many ways, and a considerable amount of time and energy may be spent integrating the functionality of the system with the everyday activities it is intended to support. Understanding how this comes about, and understanding how...

Social computing has emerged as a broad area of research in HCI and CSCW, encompassing systems that mediate social information across collectivities such as teams, communities, organizations, cohorts, populations, and markets. Such systems are likely to support and make visible social attributes such as identity, reputation, trust, accountability,...

Social computing has emerged as a broad area of research in HCI and CSCW, encompassing systems that mediate social information across collectivities such as teams, communities, organizations, cohorts, populations, and markets. Such systems are likely to support and make visible social attributes such as identity, reputation, trust, accountability,...

One way to gain a principled understanding of computer-mediated communication (CMC) use in the wild is to consider the properties of the communication medium, the usage practices, and the social context in which practices are situated. We describe the adoption and use of a novel, chat-like system called BABBLE. Drawing on interviews and conversatio...

IBM Enhanced Audio Conferencing (IEAC) is a VoIP- based audio conferencing system that, like several other systems, provides a visualization showing who is present and their states (e.g., speaking, muted). This paper presents the first study of the use of such a system. Drawing on log files collected over six weeks of use by over 1300 corporate emp...

As open source development has evolved, differentiation of roles and increased sophistication of collaborative processes has occurred. Recently, we described coordination issues in software development and an interactive visualization tool called the Social Health Overview (SHO) developed to address them (12). This paper presents an empirical evalu...

This paper describes the iterative development of a visualization for a wiki used in a large enterprise to manage research projects. An initial prototype-based field study exposed two main usage problems and provided five design ideas, which led to the development of an interactive visualization called CherryTree. The paper describes CherryTree, di...

A design story about the design of a visualization for controllers who monitor IBM's controls process, provides the backdrop for reflections on the success of a participatory design process. The story illustrates that while the design process appears to lead to a successful general technical solution, the solution fairs less well when viewed from t...

This paper describes a preliminary investigation into an internal corporate blogging community called BlogCentral. We conducted semi-structured interviews with fourteen active bloggers to investigate the role of blogging and its effects on work processes. Our findings suggest that BlogCentral facilitates access to tacit knowledge and resources vett...

This paper explores the design of visualizations that support mandated organizational compliance processes. We draw on the research literature to show how visualizations can operate as effective user interfaces for complex, distributed processes. We argue that visualizations can reduce the complexity of such processes, making them easier to manage,...

Software development tools primarily focus on supporting the technical work. Yet no matter the tools employed, the process followed, or the size of the team, important aspects of development are non-technical, and largely unsupported. For example, increasing distribution of development teams highlights the issues of coordination and cooperation. Th...

Rendezvous is a conference call solution that leverages Voice over IP, enterprise calendaring, instant messaging, and rich client functionality to enhance the user experience and effectiveness of distributed meetings. We describe the service, and two of its user experience innovations - the conference call proxy and iHelp - which function as digita...

Two applications reveal the key challenges in making context-aware computing a reality. As mobile computing devices and a variety of sensors become ubiquitous, new resources for applications and services - often collectively referred to under the rubric of context-aware computing - are becoming available to designers and developers. In this article...

Loops is a text-based computer mediated communication system aimed at small- to medium-sized corporate work groups. We begin by discussing the goals of the system and the rationale behind its design, particularly its treatment of non-conversational text. Next we describe its realization in an implemented system, and discuss how an early working ver...

IBM Community Tools (ICT) is a synchronous broadcast messaging system in use by a very large, globally distributed organization. ICT is interesting for a number of reasons, including its scale of use (thousands of users per day), its usage model of employing large scale broadcast to strangers to initiate small group interactions, and the fact that...

We discuss the legacy and processes of creative design, and differentiate it from the type of user-centered design commonly found in CHI. We provide an example of this process, and discuss how design practice constitutes an essential mode of inquiry. We argue the complementary nature of creative design and user-centered design practices. Syncretic...

Most software development tools focus on supporting the primary technical work -- writing code, managing requirements, filing bugs, etc. Yet with large teams, managing the social aspects of a project can be as complex as managing code. Here, we discuss the iterative design of a visualization that helps developers better understand the social aspect...

This article describes results from a study focused on informational and knowledge needs of local coastal resources decision makers in the Ohio Lake Erie basin. New information was obtained through a series of focus groups of local decision makers and key training providers in the basin. The results suggest that training providers and local coastal...

Summary form only given. Social computing has emerged as a broad area of research in HCI and CSCW, encompassing systems that gather, store, process, re-present, and disseminate social information that is distributed across social collectivities such as teams, communities, organizations, cohorts, populations, and markets. Social computing systems ar...

In this paper, we describe preliminary findings that indicate that managers and non-mangers think about their email differently. We asked three research managers and three research non-managers to sort about 250 of their own email messages into categories that "would help them to manage their work." Our analyses indicate that managers create more c...

This paper describes an approach to managing tasks and processes that are distributed across a large number of people. The basic idea is to use a social visualization called a task proxy to create a shared awareness amongst the participants in a task or process. The process awareness provided by the task proxy enables its users to monitor the task...

Many CSCW projects dealing with individual availability and interruption filtering achieve only limited success. Perhaps this is because designers of such systems have limited evidence to draw upon; most data on interruption management is at least a decade old. This study uses an empirical sampling method and qualitative interviews to examine attit...

research. As a research method, they can both be deeply valuable and distinctly challenging. Pragmatic challenges of interviews include the travel that may be required to meet face-to-face with a respondent or the time necessary to transcribe the exchange. As a tool for conducting interviews, instant messaging presents some compelling potential ben...

Introduction The issue of how to support the re-use of knowledge --- under rubrics such as organizational memory, knowledge management and expertise management --- has received increasing attention over the last decade. In this chapter we take a strongly social approach to the issue, arguing that knowledge (and expertise) is created, used, and diss...

This paper describes an approach to managing tasks and processes that are distributed across a large number of people. The basic idea is to use a social visualization called a task proxy to create a shared awareness amongst the participants in a task or process. The process awareness provided by the task proxy enables its users to monitor the task...

We describe the design of Loops, a second-generation CMC system aimed at small- to medium-sized corporate work groups. We begin by discussing the goals of the system and the rationale behind its design. Next we discuss how an early working version of the system was 'group tested,' and the changes that lead to. Then we describe its realization in an...

Most current research in instant messaging takes a functional or character approach to studying the medium — "what is instant messaging used for" or "what does instant messaging use look like?" These primarily "objective" approaches neglect an important class of data provided by a phenomenal approach to studying the medium — "what is it like to use...

We describe the design of Loops, a second-generation CMC system aimed at small to medium-sized groups in a corporate environment. We discuss the rationale behind the system, its goals, their realization in an implemented architecture and user interface, and our initial experiences with deployments of the system to two groups. In the course of this...

We describe the design of Loops, a second-generation CMC system aimed at small to medium-sized groups in a corporate environment. One goal of Loops was to preserve the lightweight conversation and awareness model developed in Babble. Creating this sort of environment on the web, a stateless and asynchronous medium, posed both design and implementat...

An overview of expertise sharing, an approach to knowledge management that emphasizes the human components of knowledge work in addition to information storage and retrieval. The field of knowledge management focuses on how organizations can most effectively store, manage, retrieve, and enlarge their intellectual properties. The repository view of...

As humans, we are fundamentally social creatures. From birth we orient to other people, and as we develop we acquire abilities for interacting with one another ranging from expression and gesture through spoken and written language. As adults we are exquisitely sensitive to the actions and interactions of those around us. Every day we make countles...

Many CSCW projects dealing with individual availability and interruption filtering achieve only limited success. Perhaps this is because designers of such systems have limited evidence to draw upon; most data on interruption management is at least a decade old. This study uses an empirical sampling method and qualitative interviews to examine attit...

In this article we describe a number of systems that illustrate social translucence. In particular, we introduce the notion of the social proxy, a minimalist visualization of people and their activities. Our primary example is a system called Babble [2, 3], which wevedesigned, deployed, and studied. We also describe several concept prototypes, whic...

Introduction The issue of how to support the re-use of knowledge --- under rubrics such as organizational memory, knowledge management and expertise management --- has received increasing attention over the last decade. In this chapter we take a strongly social approach to the issue, arguing that knowledge (and expertise) is created, used, and diss...

The coming ubiquity of handheld devices and e-commerce will offer many new design and application opportunities for human-computer interaction, many of them in “everyday” domains. This article reports on the iterative design of a handheld application for one such domain, grocery shopping. Our goal was to produce a solution for home ordering of groc...

Knowledge management is often seen as a problem of capturing, organizing, and retrieving information, evoking notions of data mining, text clustering, databases, and documents. We believe that this view is too simple. Knowledge is inextricably bound up with human cognition, and the management of knowledge occurs within an intricately structured soc...

An abstract is not available.

We are interested in desiging systems that support communication and collaboration among large groups of people over computing networks. We begin by asking what properties of the physical world support graceful human-human communication in face-to-face situations, and argue that it is possible to design digital systems that support coherent behavio...

As e-commerce and pervasive computing take shape, they will come together to create innovative opportunities in new application domains. This paper reports the iterative design and development of a handheld application for such a domain, that of grocery shopping. The PDA solution we describe, for home ordering of groceries, moves e-shopping beyond...

Online communities are rapidly becoming a part of how we work, play, and learn. But how are they designed? What is already known in this emerging field? What are the key questions for future research? Online communities are becoming increasingly pervasive in the personal and professional lives of people from all strata of society; however, our know...

In this position paper we summarize our efforts to design, implement, and deploy the infrastructure for conversationally-based knowledge communities. We believe that managing knowledge or expertise really means providing an on-line workplace within which users can engage socially with one another, and, in the process, discover, develop, evolve, and...