IBM Research Center for Social Business

Now on Youtube - Race Against the Machine: A Conversation with Andrew McAfee

2012-02-08T15:28:00.000-08:00

Andrew McAfee studies how Information Technology (IT) affects businesses and business as a whole. His research investigates how IT changes the way companies perform, organize themselves, and compete. At a higher level, his work also investigates how computerization affects competition itself – the struggle among rivals for dominance and survival within an industry.

McAfee's November 2011 talk at the Center for Social Business, based on his recent book, Race Against the Machine, is now on YouTube. In this talk, he brings together statistics, examples, and arguments to show that technological progress is accelerating, and that this trend has deep consequences for skills, wages, and jobs. Workers whose skills have been mastered by computers have less to offer the job market and see their wages and prospects shrink. Entrepreneurial business models, new organizational structures, and different institutions are needed to ensure that the average worker is not left behind by cutting-edge machines.

Interview with Irene Greif on Social Business - What and Why

2012-01-19T06:31:00.000-08:00

The former Center for Social Software is now the Center for Social Business. There are many reasons for changing our name. The main one is that our research has become focused on helping our clients transform themselves into social businesses.

The first question to ask and understand is, "What is a social business?" Watch this Lenny Liebmann, IT columnist, interview with Irene Greif, the Director of the Center, as she explains how a social business looks and acts.

Speaker Series now on YouTube

2011-12-21T13:58:00.000-08:00

For the past two years, The Center has hosted talks by a variety of speakers - all somehow related to social networks, social media, communities, and data analytics. We have been able to video many of these talks and recently launched our own Channel on YouTube.

Curious about what S. Craig Watkins, author of The Young and the Digital, has to say about young technology users and how that technology is shaping their lives?

Want to hear first-hand about entrepreneur Yuchun Lee's days counting cards on the MIT Blackjack team, his experience running a small company, and what it's like going from a startup to a very big company called IBM?

What social, biological, and mathematical principles help determine how and why human social networks form and how they operate? Nicholas Christakis talks about his lab's work - using observational and experimental datasets to understand the structure and function of human networks.

MIT's Sandy Pentland explores how increased productivity and creative output are key to understanding how social networks - face-to-face and digital - shape the behavior of both employees and customers.

Watch these videos and more on our Speaker Series Videos.

Race Against the Machine: A Conversation with Andrew McAfee

2011-11-03T11:32:00.000-07:00

The IBM Center for Social Software (soon to become the Center for Social Business) is very pleased to welcome Andrew McAfee to our Fall 2011 Speaker Series. Join us on November 7 at 3:30 PM for a memorable event. This talk is open to the public and free of charge. Refreshments will be served.

About the Talk

Digital technologies are rapidly encroaching on skills that used to belong to humans alone. This phenomenon is broad and deep, and has profound economic implications. Many of these implications are positive; digital innovation increases productivity, reduces prices (sometimes to zero), and grows the overall economic pie. But digital innovation has also changed how the economic pie is distributed, and here the news is not good for the median worker. As technology races ahead, it can leave many people behind. Workers whose skills have been mastered by computers have less to offer the job market, and see their wages and prospects shrink. Entrepreneurial business models, new organizational structures and different institutions are needed to ensure that the average worker is not left behind by cutting-edge machines. McAfee brings together a range of statistics, examples, and arguments to show that technological progress is accelerating, and that this trend has deep consequences for skills, wages, and jobs. He makes the case that employment prospects are grim for many today not because technology has stagnated, but instead because we humans and our organizations aren't keeping up.

About Andrew McAfee

Andrew McAfee studies the ways that information technology (IT) affects businesses and business as a whole. His research investigates how IT changes the way companies perform, organize themselves, and compete. At a higher level, his work also investigates how computerization affects competition itself – the struggle among rivals for dominance and survival within an industry.

McAfee coined the phrase “Enterprise 2.0” in a spring 2006 Sloan Management Review article to describe the use of Web 2.0 tools and approaches by businesses. He also began blogging at that time, both about Enterprise 2.0 and about his other research. McAfee is currently a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a fellow at the Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He received his Doctorate from Harvard Business School, and completed two Master of Science and two Bachelor of Science degrees at MIT.

MIT's Alex 'Sandy' Pentland: How Social Networks Shape Human Behavior...and Vice Versa

2011-10-03T15:33:00.000-07:00

We start off our Fall 2011 Speaker Series on Monday, October 17 at 3:30 with MIT's Alex 'Sandy' Pentland. Sandy will explore how increased productivity and creative output are key to understanding how social networks, face-to-face and digital, shape the behavior of both employees and customers. Through the `big data' collected by Sandy's research group via sensors, they are able to measure the behavior of hundreds of people over long periods of time, and build models that provide accurate predictions of human decision making across a wide range of scales...team, organization, and even city. These models can also be used to more effectively shape social behaviors. Sandy's team proved this when they won DARPA's 40th Anniversary Internet Grand Challenge.

As a consequence of these new capabilities, personal data is becoming ever more valuable... and also more dangerous. To address this concern Sandy will describe his work with the World Economic Forum, which has led to the emergence of a new personal data framework.

Sandy directs MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, and advises the World Economic Forum, Nissan Motor Corporation, and a variety of start-up firms. He has previously helped create and direct MIT’s Media Laboratory, the Media Lab Asia laboratories at the Indian Institutes of Technology, and Strong Hospital’s Center for Future Health. Profiles of Sandy have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, Forbes, and Harvard Business Review.

Sandy is among the most-cited computational scientists in the world, and a pioneer in computational social science, organizational engineering, mobile computing, image understanding, and modern biometrics. His research has been featured in Nature, Science, the World Economic Forum, and Harvard Business Review, as well as being the focus of TV features including Nova and Scientific American Frontiers. His most recent book is `Honest Signals,' published by MIT Press.

To register for this talk, please go to Eventbrite.

Taking Risks - Yuchun Lee's Journey from Blackjack to Big Blue

2011-06-20T09:42:00.001-07:00

Our final speaker for the Spring 2011 series Is Yuchun Lee, currently the VP of IBM's Enterprise Marketing Management Group. He will tell his personal story - about his days counting cards on the now-famous Blackjack team at MIT, his experience at Unica running a small company, and what it's like going from a startup to being bought out by a very big company.

About Yuchun Lee

Yuchun Lee is a born entrepreneur who came to the U.S. from Taiwan when he was 13. By then he was already “fascinated by the concept of commerce,” he says, in particular, “how to accumulate business and make more money.” He started a software company while in high school in Houston, TX, and says he got in his proverbial “10,000 hours” of experience with computers and programming during those formative years.

In the mid-1980s, Lee came to Boston to do his undergraduate and master’s degrees at MIT in electrical engineering and computer science. After graduating in 1989, he went to work for Digital Equipment Corporation, the venerable Route 128 computer company. Lee left DEC and started Unica in 1992, together with two other MIT grads. Unica was acquired by IBM in 2010.

Genevieve Bell - Fellow & Director of Interaction and UX Labs at Intel

2011-05-09T14:32:00.001-07:00

The IBM Center for Social Software welcomes

Genevieve Bell

Intel Fellow, Intel Labs
Director, Interaction & Experience Research

Divining a Digital Future

Genevieve Bell joined Intel in 1998 as a researcher in Corporate Technology Group's People and Practices Research team — Intel's first social science oriented research team. She helped drive the company's first non-U.S. field studies to inform business group strategy and products and conducted groundbreaking work in urban Asia in the early 2000s. Bell has been the driving force behind Intel's emerging user-experience focus: over the last decade, she has fundamentally changed how Intel envisions, plans, and develops its platforms.
Bell currently leads an R&D team of social scientists, interaction designers, human factors engineers, and a range of technology researchers to create the next generation of compelling user experiences across a range of internet-connected devices, platforms, and services. She will drive user-centered experience and design across the compute continuum.
Prior to joining Intel, Bell was a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. She has written more than 25 journal articles and book chapters on a range of subjects focused on the intersection of technology and society. Her book, "Divining the Digital Future," co-authored with Prof. Paul Dourish, will be released by MIT Press in spring 2011.
Raised in Australia, Bell received her bachelor's degree in anthropology from Bryn Mawr College in 1990. She received her master's and doctorate degrees in anthropology from Stanford University in 1993 and 1998, respectively.

Monday, May 16, 2011, 3:30 - 5:00pm; refreshments served
IBM Research, 1 Rogers St, Cambridge MA
Free and open to the public: RSVP @ Eventbrite
Discounted parking at Galleria Mall. Bring ticket for validation

Our Spring speaker series presents Tom Malone on Collective Intellgence

2011-04-21T15:15:00.000-07:00

Join us for a talk with Tom Malone, the founder of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, and a Professor at the MIT Sloan School.

Monday, May 02, 3:30-5:00pm
1 Rogers St, Cambridge
Open to the public
RSVP at http://tom-malone.eventbrite.com

Collective Intelligence: What is it? How can we measure it and how can we increase it?

Tom’s talk will describe how the techniques used to measure individual intelligence can be used to measure the "collective intelligence" of groups. Just as with individuals, a single statistical factor can predict the performance of a group on a wide range of different tasks. Although this factor is weakly correlated with the individual intelligence of group members, it is strongly correlated with the social perceptiveness, conversational behavior, and gender of group members.

Tom will also discuss other work being done to increase collective intelligence by: (a) combining predictions from humans and computers, (b) mapping the "genome" of collective intelligence, and (c) harnessing ideas from thousands of people around the world for dealing with global climate change.

About Tom
Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. He was also the founding director of the MIT Center for Coordination Science and one of the two founding co-directors of the MIT Initiative on "Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century". Professor Malone teaches classes on leadership and information technology, and his research focuses on how new organizations can be designed to take advantage of the possibilities provided by information technology.

Chieko Asakawa, IBM Fellow at the Yamato Research Lab in Tokyo, Receives 2011 Anita Borg Award

2011-03-13T18:07:00.000-07:00

The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) was founded in 1997 by renowned computer scientist Anita Borg, Ph.D. (1949-2003). Initially known as the Institute for Women in Technology, IWT was renamed in 2003 to the Anita Borg Institute in order to honor Dr. Borg.

The ABI Women of Vision Awards, hosted by the ABI Board of Trustees, honors women making significant contributions to technology. One winner is selected in each category: Innovation, Leadership, and Social Impact.

This year, Chieko Asakawa has been named the Women of Vision Award winner in the Leadership category. She is recognized for her work as a leader in the field of accessibility. Her work at IBM has led to breakthrough technologies including Japan’s first computer based Braille library system and Home Page Reader which has helped the visually impaired and others with disabilities, easily surf websites. Her most recent innovation, aDesigner, is used by Web designers today across the globe to help them build pages that are accessible to those with poor sight.

Based on decades of unrelenting efforts, Chieko has become an international leader in accessibility research. After helping to create Japan’s digital Braille network in the 1980s, Chieko developed a pioneering voice browser, and from her work, IBM released the Home Page Reader in 1997.

In 2008, Chieko launched the Social Accessibility project. The project introduced a brand new approach to creating bridges among the communities of visually impaired web users who face web accessibility issues. Using a mix of server based and client based software developed by her team, Chieko’s team developed a solution which offers an open and collaborative environment where everyone can work together to address accessibility issues.

Chieko joined IBM in 1985 and became an IBM Fellow in 2009. She received her Doctorate from the University of Tokyo in 2004, and she is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology. Inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 2003, Chieko is also a member of the Association for Computer Machinery(ACM), a member of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers(IEICE), and a Fellow of the Information Processing Society of Japan(IPSJ ).

Chieko has received a number of awards, including the 2010 SWE Achievement Award, the highest honor from the Society of Women Engineers in 2010 in recognition of her pioneering research and technical advances in web accessibility.

Lawrence Lessig on Institutional Corruption

2011-01-25T10:49:00.000-08:00

Join us at the IBM Center for Social Software for a talk with Lawrence Lessig

Monday, Feb 07, 2011. 3:30-5:00pm; refreshments served
IBM Research, 1 Rogers St, Cambridge MA 02142
Free and open to the public with RSVP at eventbrite
Discounted parking at Galleria Mall. Bring ticket to validate.

About Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig is the Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

Prior to his current work at Harvard, Lessig was a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School (where he was founder of Stanford's Center for Internet and Society), Harvard Law School (1997-2000), and the University of Chicago Law School. Lessig clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.

For much of his academic career, Lessig has focused on law and technology, especially as it affects copyright. His current academic work probes the question of "institutional corruption" — roughly, the dependencies within an economy of influence that weaken the effectiveness of an institution, or weaken public trust. His current work at the EJ Safra Lab oversees a 5 year research project addressing institutional corruption in a number of contexts.

Big Data, Global Development, & Complex Social Systems - A Talk with Nathan Eagle

2010-11-08T17:11:00.000-08:00

When: Mon, Nov 22, 2010; 3:30-5:00pm; refreshments served.
Where: IBM Research, 1 Rogers St, Cambridge MA 02142
Free and open to the public with RSVP at Eventbrite
Discounted parking at Galleria Mall. Bring parking ticket for validation.

About the talk
Vast amounts data about human movements, transactions, and communication patterns are continuously being generated by everyday technologies such as mobile phones and credit cards. This unprecedented volume of information provides a novel set of research questions that can be applied to a wide range of issues.

Nathan Eagle and his colleagues - in collaboration with the mobile phone, internet, and credit card industries - are collecting and analyzing behavioral data from over 250 million people across the world. In this talk, he will discuss some projects that focus on behavioral dynamics over a broad spectrum of scales - from risky behavior in a group of MIT freshman, to wealth in the UK, and cholera outbreaks in Rwanda.

This vast volume of data requires new analytical tools. Nathan's team is developing a range of large-scale network analysis and machine learning algorithms designed to provide deeper insight into human behavior. His goal, as he says, is "to determine how we can use these insights to actively improve the lives of the billions of people who generate this data and the societies in which they live."

About Nathan Eagle
Nathan Eagle is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the MIT, a Research Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, and an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. His research involves engineering computational tools, designed to explore how data generated about human behavioral patterns can be used for social good.

Nathan is the CEO of txteagle Inc, a mobile crowdsourcing company that has recently become one of the largest employers in Kenya. txteagle helps companies increase productivity, reduce expenses, and gain new insights by harnessing the power of the massive, low cost workforce in the developing world. They have a patent-pending platform that is enabling 2 billion mobile phone users in 80 countries to earn money or airtime by doing work on a phone or computer.

He holds a BS and two MS degrees from Stanford University. His PhD from the MIT Media Lab on Reality Mining was declared one of the "ten technologies most likely to change the way we live" by the MIT Technology Review.

Hiring Software Engineers - Thanks for your interest - job has been filled.

2010-11-01T20:15:00.000-07:00

The IBM Center for Social Software is seeking software engineers to help us design and build the next generation of social and collaborative applications. Our engineers work in small teams with leading research scientists and designers to solve critical problems in social networking, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and visualization. Our group provides a friendly and intellectually exciting environment with the opportunity to have significant impact both inside and outside IBM.

Candidates should hold a B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related field and should have skills in one or more of the following areas:
• Design and construction of Web applications with rich user experiences. Some of the tools we currently use: jQuery, Dojo, Ruby on Rails, and J2EE.
• Scalable system architecture and cloud deployment. Experience with Linux, Hadoop, relational databases, and NoSQL data stores is a plus.
• Mobile development for iOS and Android. Familiarity with non-traditional user interfaces, such as speech or touch.
• Analytics on structured and unstructured data, such as multimedia processing, social network analysis, or natural language processing.

Candidates with a PhD may also be considered for a Research Staff Member position, which in addition to the skills above, requires experience in publishing at top-tier HCI, CSCW, or Visualization conferences. The position includes setting research directions, conducting research analysis, and continuing to publish.

This is a full-time position and is based in Cambridge, MA. To apply, send your resume/CV via email to socialsoftware@us.ibm.com with the subject line "Software Engineer Position".

IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

Announcing our 2010 Fall Speaker Series

2010-09-26T19:14:00.000-07:00

This fall, we will be hosting four amazing speakers: S. Craig Watkins, Tiffany Shlain, Nathan Eagle, and Nicholas Christakis. All events are free and open to the public.

Come to the Center for Social Software in Cambridge, for the first of our fall 2010 speaker series, on October 11...

The Social Impacts of Young People’s New Media

Here are the facts:
Nine out of ten American teenagers are online.
Over 70% use social network sites daily.
75% own a mobile phone.

Join S. Craig Watkins, author of The Young and the Digital, in a conversation about the social media behaviors captured in his talks with young technology users and how it is shaping their lives.

S. Craig Watkins studies young people's social and digital media behaviors. At the University of Texas, Austin, he teaches in the departments of Radio-Television-Film and Sociology and the Center for African and African American Studies. Watkins has participated in the MacArthur Foundation initiative on Youth, Digital Media and Learning, exploring the intersection of digital media, everyday life, and learning.

Logistics:
Register at Eventbrite.
When: Monday, Oct 11, 2010. 3:30pm - 5:00pm; refreshments served.
Where: IBM Research, 1 Rogers St, Cambridge MA 02142
Parking: Galleria Mall, next to IBM. Bring parking ticket for validation.

Wondering how to teach students about teamwork? Try "Software for a Cause!"

2010-08-04T20:04:00.000-07:00

It all started after a call between IBM Rational Marketing and IBM Researchers Li-Te Cheng and John Patterson of the Center for Social Software. The topic of the call? How to get people to notice and try out IBM® Rational® Jazz®.

What is Rational Jazz? A new software development technology platform co-conceived by Rational and Research. The platform is designed for distributed teams, which is the way most of the world works. The idea behind Jazz is to transform how people work together on a project by integrating and synchronizing the people, processes, and assets associated with that project.

Back to the call...Li-Te and John's call got them thinking about how to engage students using Jazz itself. So afterwards they continued discussing what might encourage people to write code in teams. They believed Jazz might be a great tool to teach Computer Science students the fundamentals of distributed software teamwork.

Getting students from different universities to co-develop something in a class, using Jazz in a distributed manner, would be an ideal setting. They believed they could harness the prevalent open-source hacker ethos and get a group of students to do it for a cause. And, because social software has enabled people to become more active and connected than in the past, it's easier to get involved in social good. Li-Te decided that this type of project was perfect for a summer internship at the Center in Cambridge, MA. The next steps were finding a "cause" to work with, students to work on it, and - most critically - the right summer intern to design the project.

Li-Te convinced colleagues at McGill University in Montreal and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver to run their second year computer science courses together. He made arrangements using IBM's Open Collaborative Research Program, which enables IBM Researchers to work together with university faculty on joint projects. His colleagues were enthusiastic, but had two concerns: they did not want to host and manage a Jazz server, and they wanted to work with a Canadian cause.

Rational helped put Li-Te in contact with Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY. Marist was setting up server hosting of various IBM products for academic users as part of its Enterprise Computing Community initiative. They offered to host a Jazz server, and Software for a Cause became one of their first customers.

IBM Corporate Citizenship helped Li-Te make contact with the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and he approached them about doing the project. This foundation serves a community of about 3000 people who, because of their compromised physical condition, need to avoid face-to-face contact. Tools such as Facebook and Skype have made a huge difference in their lives. The Foundation agreed to work with IBM, as the "customer" for Software for a Cause.

So, with help from various IBM resources, Li-Te had participants and a proposal. Now he needed to find a summer intern to create the tools for the course. He had to get just the right person to design the tools, develop and assist with teaching the course, and work with us as it all unfolded. In our next post on this topic, we'll meet that person. Tristan Ratchford, a graduate student at McGill, is spending his summer designing this project for the Computer Science class he'll be teaching this Fall semester.

Stay tuned.

The People and Impetus behind Many Bills

2010-06-25T09:45:00.000-07:00

MAPLight.org is a public watchdog group that uses the data from Congressional voting records on bills, supporting and opposing interests for each bill, and campaign contribution data to revealing connections that could never before be easily seen.

In September 2009, the Visual Communication Lab (the VCL) of the IBM Center for Social Software hosted an event called "the Transparent Text Symposium," spurred by the US government initiative for transparency. MapLight had heard about the symposium and sent the VCL the text of bill HR627, the "Credit CARD Act of 2009." This bill (now Public Law No: 111-24) is an amendment to the Truth in Lending Act, and was created to make sweeping changes in the credit card industry and protect consumers against egregious pricing.

The bill is 33 pages. The content of almost all of it relates to the title of the bill, and what you'd expect. On page 31, however, section 512, titled PROTECTING AMERICANS FROM VIOLENT CRIME, concerns the right to bear firearms in National Parks. Two questions immediately arise: 1. Why would anyone want to allow automatic rifles in National Parks, and 2. What was that doing in a bill about consumer credit card protection? Then the VCL asked themselves a third question: "As a visual communication lab, how could we help people find things like this?"

Lab members Irene Ros and Yannick Assogba decided to take on the challenge to create a tool to help reveal various topics in a bill - not just the bizarre outliers like this one - but all topics. This came to be the germination of a research project - how could a text corpora best be navigated visually? What impact would a visualization have on people's ability to find what they were looking for. And, who would be likely to use this type of tool?

According to Assogba, "We decided to present the bills in a map mode with the text as a zoomable entity. Knowing that these bills are filled with "legalese" our first step was to help people navigate through the data to find the general area they wanted to examine." On April 5, 2010, after many designs, prototypes, and user input, the team launched a public Beta of what is now called Many Bills. Says Ros, "Our hope is that the interface offers users an overview of this complex dataset while still allowing for full access to the original text." Now that the tool has been available for almost three months, they are beginning to understand what things people want to explore and how better to show that. The next big push is to contact Many Bills visitors who have offered to provide feedback and see how they respond to some proposed feature additions and design changes the researchers would like to make.

Have you visited Many Bills? Try browsing. Or, take a look at various versions of HR627 on its journey through Congress. If you have comments, click the Feedback button on the site to give Assogba and Ros your ideas.

Jer Thorp examines how a new era of open data is affecting science, art, and design

2010-06-14T10:42:00.000-07:00

On June 21, 2010, the Cambridge lab of the IBM Center for Social Software will kick off a new speaker series open to the public. Our aim with this series is to attract a steady local audience and build a community of interest by hosting speakers who are well-known and respected in their area of social software.

We are very pleased to have Jer Thorp, data artist and educator, as our first speaker. Jer is a former geneticist. He uses that background in his practice to explore "the many-folded boundaries between science and art." His art has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, BusinessWeek and the CBC. His award-winning software-based work has been exhibited in Europe, Asia, North America, South America, and Australia and all over the web.

Jer is an instructor in Langara College’s Electronic Media Design Program, a frequent guest lecturer at the University of British Columbia and Emily Carr University, and a sought-after speaker at various venues around the world.

Jer's Talk: Hacking the Newsroom

In February of last year, the New York Times announced that it was giving away the keys to 28 years of data - news stories, movie reviews, obituaries, and political statistics - all for free. Whether the dying gasp of an legendary institution, or the beginnings of an extraordinary rebirth, the release of this vast and historically significant information has been a boon to data visualizers, entrepreneurs, social scientists and artists around the world.

In this session, Jer will show a variety of work that he has produced using data from The New York Times, The Guardian, and other traditional and non-traditional media sources. He'll show how to access this information easily, and will share code samples to get you started in explorations of your own. Along the way, he'll attempt to examine how a new era of open data is affecting science, art, and design.

This event will take place Monday, June 21st 2010. 3:30pm-5:00pm at 1 Rogers St, Cambridge MA. Admission is FREE.

More info and registration at Eventbrite

Late-breaking Summer Internship Openings @ IBM Center for Social Software, Cambridge, MA

2010-05-14T08:29:00.000-07:00

"Smarter Social Cities" Summer Internship Openings

This summer project will be a team effort in the area of "Smarter Social Cities" research. The proposed project will explore the role of social collaboration in supporting the discovery of the cities people inhabit or visit. The team will design and develop mobile and web tools to support co-discovery and include mechanisms to map attractions to personal interests. The goal of the project will be to implement a basic working prototype of a novel idea, which the interns will play a significant role in shaping.

We are looking for the intern candidates with skills in one or more of the following areas:

Experience with design, prototyping, and web development tools and technologies. A plus: experience with Apple interface builder and HAML.
Familiarity with Ruby on Rails, Apache, and Linux
Understanding of database setup in Rails. Understanding of web services and remote DB access
Experience with mobile development. A plus: experience developing iPod apps with networking component

To be eligible, students must be enrolled in a full-time academic program. Advanced undergraduates or Masters students preferred.

If interested, please send a note and your resume/CV to shupfer@us.ibm.com.

"Mass Participation Social Software" Summer Internship Opening

We are looking for a graduate (or advanced undergraduate) intern with UI and web development skills to develop an innovative prototype as part of a larger project aimed at supporting participation in large scale events. The project can include novel ways of visualizing and interacting with back-channels, such as those that result from posts on Twitter around an event, as well as inventing new mechanisms for brainstorming, polling, breakout discussions, and decisions through web and mobile interfaces. The goal of the intern project will be to implement a basic working prototype of a novel idea, an idea which the intern will play a significant role in shaping.

To be eligible, students must be enrolled in a full-time academic program. If interested, please send a note and your resume/CV to daniel_gruen@us.ibm.com.

Launching Many Bills: A Visual Bill Explorer

2010-04-05T11:21:00.000-07:00

Government transparency is an important issue to many in today's political environment. The recent controversy in the US over health care reform is just one example of how hard it can be to see the realities behind the rhetoric. As researchers, we believe we can help by giving people the right tools to understand, explore, and communicate about government data.

Inspired by the fantastic people we met and conversations we had at the Center's Transparent Text conference last year, we decided to act. Today, the Visual Communication Lab at the Center launches IBM Many Bills: A Visual Bill Explorer. Many Bills is a web-based visualization that enables members of the public to see the high-level topic structure of US Congressional Bills, then drill down and read the actual content. The dataset currently includes all bills considered by both houses in 2009, plus some select content from 2010, courtesy of GovTrack.

You can find more news and updates on the Many Bills blog or follow the project on Twitter.

Social Software from Haifa Research Lab Shines at Lotusphere

2010-01-29T14:59:00.000-08:00

Social analytics software from IBM's Haifa Research Lab (HRL) was front and center at the opening session of Lotusphere this year. A demo of the next version of Lotus Connections showed off recommender widgets from HRL. Even more ambitious recommender systems and social analytics based on work from Haifa were envisioned for Vulcan -- the bleuprint for the future of collaboration that Lotus unveiled later in the session.

What people saw was based on SaND, a platform developed by HRL for mining and aggregating social data across multiple data sources in an enterprise. The result is a rich model of relationships among people, content and tags, which search engines, recommender systems, expertise locators, social network analysis systems and visualizations can tap into. For example, the content recommender widget in Lb Connections Next suggests items such as wikis, blog entries, bookmarks, and communities based on the relationships it detects. Detailed explanations for each recommendation explains why it is being suggested. SaND is already used by many IBM projects world-wide.

In the Innovation Lab attendees also got a peek at DUNE (Desktop Unified with Enterprise). DUNE — a first step towards aggregation across the entire Lotus Portfolio — collects social data across Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime in addition to Connections. SaND also has the capability to extend beyond IBM to external products.

Research Talk at Lotusphere Focuses on Enterprise Health and Many Bills

2010-01-21T13:03:00.000-08:00

In their Research talk at Lotusphere, IBM Center for Social Software Director Irene Greif and Researcher David Millen highlighted new work from the Center. In the area of enterprise social software, they reported on the latest adoption and assessment studies, including new dashboards for community health, Vivacity and BlogMuse (both seen in the Innovation Lab).

Vivacity shows a variety of ways people are contributing in Connections, and highlights the concept of "Return on Content" as a way to measure impact and understand the relative value of different kinds of contributions, such as status updates, profile changes, blog or wiki entries. BlogMuse encourages people to contribute in meaningful ways to enterprise blogs.

Federal legislation is a hot topic these days, and the Center's latest work on visualization, dubbed Many Bills, tackles the challenges of government transparency and citizen participation by helping people navigate and understand large, complex documents, then communicate with others about them. While Many Bills focuses on government, the work has strong implications for business communities, as well.

Many Bills, tackling the challenges of government transparency and citizen participation.

LotusLive Labs: Trying Out New Technologies from IBM Research

2010-01-21T09:33:00.000-08:00

LotusLive Labs was announced Monday at Lotusphere and demoed throughout the week in other talks and in the Innovation Lab. LotusLive Labs is a collaboration between IBM Research and LotusLive that lets users evaluate experimental IBM Research technologies that are integrated with LotusLive. It's another route to market for Venture Research, and opens today with several social and collaborative applications. Slides can be shared individually or in decks, so that people can easily create new presentations from material already available in their organization. Meetings can be recorded, but more importantly can be tagged for later reference, making it easy to skip to just the parts that are proving to be of most interest. Eventmaps, an interactive way to visualize conference schedules, was available to plan attendance at Lotusphere, and Composer lets you create LotusLive mashups by combining LotusLive services. Later this year, Concord, collaborative, real-time document-authoring technology from the IBM China Research Lab, will be available on LotusLive Labs. This set of Web-based editors will let multiple authors create and edit documents on-line in real-time, making them relevant, accurate and up-to-date.

To read about the demos in the Innovation Lab sponsored by the Center for Social Software, click here.

Glimpsing the Future of Social Software at Lotusphere

2010-01-21T08:07:00.000-08:00

Lotus customers got a glimpse of the future of social software at Lotusphere this week. Lotusphere draws thousands of Lotus customers, business partners, and press every year who gather to learn about what's new from Lotus. In the Innovation Lab sponsored by the Center for Social Software, members of IBM Research, Lotus, and IBM's CIO office showed off 20 leading-edge projects designed to help people work together.

One of the new social prototypes that visitors saw was the Visual Backchannel, which we aimed at Lotusphere itself. The Visual Backchannel shows what people are talking about at a large-scale event by visualizing tweets as wordclouds and topical streams in real-time. The visualizations are interactive, so attendees can select a topic, word or phrase and then drill down to specific messages, people and images. Enhancements that will let people conduct polls and form impromptu groups around topics of interest are already in the works. The picture below shows exactly when in the opening session on Monday, the Project Vulcan was announced and how twittering about the new vision from Lotus continued throughout the day. Vulcan -- IBM's next generation collaboration platform -- adds business and social analytics capabilities to Notes and other applications in the current Lotus portfolio.

The Visual Backchannel shows what people are talking about at a large-scale event

To see descriptions of all the demos shown in the Innovation Lab, click here.

Why oh Why?

2010-01-21T08:03:00.000-08:00

Millions of people are familiar with Many Eyes, the tool that Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg created to help users make sense of data by visualizing it. In this New York Op Ed piece, Fernanda and Martin take a turn at asking seasonal questions and using Many Eyes to find out which ones people are asking most often on the web.

Try it out here.

Courtesy of the New York Times

IBM Hosts Second Life Exhibition Space

2009-12-14T14:01:00.000-08:00

For the last several years, IBM has maintained a presence in the virtual world of Second Life, including the well-used IBM 6 public sandbox. The sandbox has been home and training ground to some of Second LIfe's most talented builders. Since May of 2009, the Center for Social Software's IBM Exhibition Space (located near the sandbox, on IBM 2 and IBM 3) has been hosting large-scale virtual artworks. The site is curated by Andrew Sempere, who selects the works and collaborates with the artists to ensure that the Exhibits represent the best that Second LIfe artwork has to offer. IBM's Exhibition Space was recently featured in a post at Art 21, the blog spun off from the Emmy-nominated PBS series on Art in the 21st Century. In this article, author Nettrice Gaskins interviews IBM Artist in Residence Bryn Oh about her piece
The Rabbicorn.

Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas interviewed on CNN

2009-11-20T14:31:00.000-08:00

Center research scientists Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas were among the data visualization experts interviewed in a recent CNN.com article. Wattenberg and Viégas point out how new tools help us "see" and understand large amounts of data in ways that were virtually unheard of a decade ago. Today's technology lets us make sense of complicated issues such as the health care bills floated by the government and the discussion swirling around them. check out what's happening in our neighborhood, or find what days the American public was the happiest.

Read more about this here:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/02/data.viz/index.html

Susanne Hupfer goes to India with the Corporate Service Corps

2009-10-22T15:11:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, Susanne Hupfer landed in Ahmadabad, a remote area in Northern India. Susanne, Assistant Director of the Center for Social Software, is one of several hundred IBMers who will spend a month working in developing countries as part of the IBM Corporate Services Corps. She and others from the company will team with the department of tribal affairs to help to jump start ecotourism into the GIR Forest National park -- home to endangered African lions.

You can read more about the program in these recent articles from the Boston Business Journal and Portfolio.

You can follow Susanne's journey via her twitter account.

Social Blue: IBM's internal social network

2009-10-22T13:41:00.000-07:00

Find out why IBM started it and why it works so well. In this podcast from the Financial Times online, Joan Dimicco, a Research Scientist from the IBM Center talks to the BBC about why employees and managers alike love it, how they use it. and what surprised the team who deployed it two years ago.

Learn more about SocialBlue.

Listen to the podcast.

Boston Business Journal honors IBM's Martin Wattenberg

2009-10-19T11:31:00.000-07:00

On October 2, the Boston Business Journal (BBJ) named Martin Wattenberg of IBM Research one of the Forty Under Forty. Every year the BBJ honors forty rising stars within Massachusetts' innovative business and nonprofit communities who are under forty years old. Martin was selected for his work with data visualizations from more than 300 nominations. Here are highlights from Martin's profile in the special supplement:

The technical aspects of visual representation captivated him and in 1992, Wattenberg joined IBM Corp. to perform research on how to make data and text easily understood by a wide variety of people.

The visual beauty of some of his creations have landed them in institutions around the world including at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Museum in London and on outdoor screens in Harvard Square.

Center takes the lead on transparent text with Symposium

2009-10-07T16:43:00.000-07:00

On September 21 and 22, the Center for Social Software marked its first anniversary with a groundbreaking symposium on transparent text. The symposium, held in Cambridge, focused on ways to make large collections of documents understandable to lay people and experts alike. The symposium connected over 140 pioneers in government, nonprofits, academia, and the media, jumpstarting the discussion on how to disseminate, analyze, and explain textual data. The keynote address was delivered by the Beth Noveck, Deputy CTO for Open Government, who directs the White House Open Government Initiative. A key challenge for transparency and citizen engagement lies in unlocking the value and meaning in textual data. The speakers and attendees alike explored approaches that shed light on unstructured text, ranging from novel statistical techniques to web-based crowdsourcing. The highly successful symposium vibrated with energy, generating potential collaborations, partnerships, and customer engagements.

To see a list of speakers, attendees, and topics, click here.

To read sample attendee blog posts:

Follow the tweets from the Symposium by searching for #tt09 on Twitter.

To see pictures from the Symposium, search for text09 on Flickr.

Center Welcomes Summer Interns

2009-07-01T15:31:00.000-07:00

To some people, Summer in Cambridge means Red Sox baseball, trips to Cape Cod, and ice cream. To those of us at IBM Research, it also means a new group of talented young interns come to work with us on social software. This year our interns hail from as far away as China, South Korea, and Germany, and from as close as just a few blocks away. They represent a wide variety of universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Wisconsin, and University of Canada, and University of California, Irvine, where they are studying computer science, design, and psychology, During the next few months they will tackle issues that help us understand how people can collaborate more effectively.

For example, one of our interns is exploring how people represent themselves online in e-meetings. As companies become geographically distributed, we frequently find ourselves working with people on the other side of the globe. Even when our colleagues and customers are close by, it's easier and cheaper to meet electronically rather face-to-face, And even though meeting digitally has become commonplace, the jury is still out on how best to represent ourselves to others sitting around the "virtual table." Granted, the recent explosion of digital media has given us a vast array of ways to tell people who we are and what we are doing. But what works best? Text? Pictures? Status messages? Video? Some combination of these? What happens when we have limited space -- do we become more creative? What kinds of information get people to click to find out more about someone?

We are excited to have them working with us. Watch for more stories about what are interns are up to this Summer.

Wordle Wins a Webby!

2009-05-22T13:41:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Jonathan Feinberg on winning the Webby Award! The Webby Awards celebrates the best Websites, Interactive Advertising, Online Film & Video, and Mobile applications with The Webby Award and The People's Voice Award. This year Wordle -- Feinberg's popular tool for turning text into dazzling visualizations that can be shared with others -- took both honors in the The Best Use of Typography category. Of the thousands of entries received, less than 15% are nominated, and only two in each category take the prize. Members of The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences choose the nominees for both awards in each category, as well as the winners of the Webby Awards. But the People's Voice award is the collective voice of people from the worldwide online community who vote for their favorites.

We sat down with Jonathan, to ask him a few questions about Wordle and winning the Webby.

How did you get the idea for Wordle?

Excerpted from Can I have a Wordle with you? -- an IBM Research Computer Science Spotlight interview with Jonathan.

The core of the visual part of Wordle -- the word layout algorithm -- is something I developed as a tangent while working on another project called Dogear, which is a social bookmarking engine.

One of the ubiquitous features of social bookmarking is a tag cloud. A tag cloud is a layout of the most frequently used tags, tags being arbitrary text key-words that people assign to their bookmarks, or by extension, to other resources. It's kind of a gestalt or a gist way of looking at the work you've been doing or of the metadata you've been creating.

The tag clouds I saw at the time were pretty boring and in my opinion kind of ugly. One day a blogger who calls himself Black Belt Jones put on the Web a really simple but very lovely tag cloud that he had made of his own tags from the Delicious social bookmarking engine. He had represented some of the tags in different fonts and heâ€™d laid them out in interesting angles on the page, and he even had the dot of an â€œiâ€ inside the counter of a G. I thought there's got to be a way to write a computer program to do that.

What has been the response you've gotten so far?

I've received thousands of emails from all kinds of people who enjoy using Wordle. Many of the emails have suggested FAQs, design refinements, and new features.

Do you have a favorite Wordle? What was it used for?

There have been many. The one I remember most fondly is the Boston Globe's comparison of the Obama and McCain blogs. That was the first time I thought that someone had understood how to exploit specific choices in font, layout, and color.

How do you feel about winning the Webby?

I take the Webby award as a validation of Wordle's design as a web application -- not, necessarily, as a visualization. While I would have done a couple of things differently, knowing what I know now, I think that my decision to privilege "low barrier to entry" as a design constraint has been vindicated.

IBM participated in the Cambridge Science Festival

2009-05-14T17:20:00.000-07:00

On April 25 the Cambridge Science Carnival kicked off a nine-day, city-wide celebration of science. The carnival featured a plethora of displays and activities at MIT's Kresge Auditorium and was attended by several thousand people. IBM had two booths at this event: "Kids Design Computers of the Future!" (run by IBM Research) gave approximately 200 children a chance to let their imaginations run wild as they turned recyclables and craft materials into "computers of the future," and "Design a Web Site for Bart Simpson" (run by IBM Interactive) gave older children insight into the information and creative design process that underlies web site creation.

See more photos from the event at our Flickr stream:

IBM followed this initial event with an Open House at the Center for Social Software in Cambridge on April 30. This exciting cross-division event featured demos from Research, IBM Interactive, CIO, and Lotus and drew an audience of about 250 people from the neighborhood, the area high-tech community, and the press. Attendees were treated to leading-edge demos on: Social Networking for the Enterprise; Social Software Recommenders; Harvesting User Innovations from Social Software Applications; Many Eyes (collaborative data visualization); Olympus (avatars for the web); Sametime 3D (3D virtual environment); CRAFT (collaborative reasoning); TAP (Technology Adoption Program); Lotus Connections; Next-generation Life Science, Insurance, and Banking.

Press articles have appeared at: Information Week and Big Fat Finance Blog.

Center Hosts Walking Tour for CHI

2009-04-17T16:30:00.000-07:00

On April 10 attendees from the 2009 CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) Conference got a firsthand look at the latest thinking in social software. Since the CHI conference was held in Boston this year, IBM, Google and Microsoft organized a post-conference tour of their Cambridge Research labs. The annual CHI conference is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction -- the premier organization of researchers and practitioners who study and develop user interfaces. Over 100 people took advantage of the perfect spring day to join the walking tour.

At the IBM stop, visitors explored a gallery of programs and projects available from the Center for Social Software. Researchers, designers, and developers from the Center demoed 15 of the cutting-edge projects that the Center has to offer, including projects already popular on the web such as Wordle and Many Eyes, a trio of new applications from IBM Interactive that help consumers manage their health care, insurance, and banking with visualizations and what-if scenarios, and internal experimental enterprise software from CIO and Research for aggregating feeds, sharing information and networking. The IBMers behind the work were on hand to chat with the visitors, answer questions, and hear their thoughts about what they saw.

For people local to Cambridge, there will be another opportunity to see these innovations.. As part of the Cambridge Science Fair, the Center is sponsoring an open house from 4:00 to 7:00 PM on Thursday, April 30. Please join us on the second floor balcony at 1 Rogers Street in Cambridge and bring your friends, family, and colleagues. We hope to see you there!

Joan DiMicco Speaks at Ignite Boston 5

2009-03-18T14:45:00.000-07:00

Joan DiMicco recently took the stage at Ignite Boston. During her five-minute spot, she described IBM's internal experiment with social networking and the surprising lessons learned from bringing a social networking tool inside the workplace. She observed that although the tool may be similar to an outside social network site, because it is part of a large enterprise, its use and the relationships among the users are actually very different. For example, employees discuss a mixture of professional and non-work topics and have fewer privacy concerns behind the firewall than expected.

Ignite Boston was part of a series of informal gatherings that O'Reilly sponsors in different cities where people can network, share ideas, and get to know each other. Over twenty speakers gave 5-minute talks on topics ranging from social media, to personal energy consumption, to an algorithm for political redistricting, to tips for running a start-up to the enthusiastic audience of local entrepreneurs, social media enthusiasts, and high-tech professionals.

Watch a video of Joan's Ignite talk here.

developerWorks Podcast Interview with Irene Greif

2009-03-09T15:33:00.000-07:00

Why is social software so hot these days? Why are businesses getting comfortable with activities such as sharing pictures of their kids with colleagues that they considered "frivolous" only a short time ago? How can social software can make our jobs easier -- whether we adopt it as our primary desktop application or stick with the one we've been using for years? Are cloud computing and amateur developers already shaping social software? How can Venture Research -- large-scale deployments of social software applications on the Internet such as Many Eyes -- help us understand their business value?

Find out in this podcast interview with Irene Greif, Director of the Center for Social Software and IBM Fellow.

Listen now

Boston Globe Interviews Martin Wattenberg

2009-01-13T16:10:00.000-08:00

In a recent interview with the Boston Globe, Center researcher Martin Wattenberg traced his fascination with how transforming data into pictures helps us understand information in new ways--and sometimes results in images of great beauty. The article chronicles his early love affair with the potential of the Internet, his groundbreaking work on the Map of the Market for SmartMoney Magazine, the birth of the IBM Research Visual Communication Lab (VCL) in 2005, and more.

To read the Globe article click here

If Wattenberg's name sounds familiar to you, maybe it's because you, like so many others, have discovered Many Eyes, the IBM-sponsored public site the VCL created where you can visualize your own data sets and discuss them with others. Below is a visualization of the first academic paper on the Many Eyes system. It uses the Wordle software invented by Center member Jonathan Feinberg

You might also have come across some of these visualizations recently on the New York Times Online site. Behind Many Eyes is the conviction that the use of public, engaging visualizations can lead the wisdom of the crowds to unlock the meaning of complex data sets.

Innovation lab Showcases Social Software

2009-01-13T15:21:00.000-08:00

This week at the Innovation Lab at Lotusphere, customers, press, analysts and IBMers will get a glimpse of the way people will work together in the future in the IBM Research Innovation Lab. The Innovation Lab, which is sponsored by IBM Research in Cambridge, offers a firsthand look at why IBM is widely viewed as a leader in collaborative and social software. IBM researchers, developers and designers will demo over 20 ground-breaking applications for the Web including several exemplars of research from the Center for Social Software. Lotusphere -- the premiere gathering of Lotus users and the people behind the software they use -- draws thousands of enthusiastic attendees to Orlando every year. Although the lab's projects are not product offerings, it has become known as a place to get a sense of direction for future products, and a place where social software "fit for business" has been highlighted for several years.

Representatives from the Center will be in the lab, discussing Venture Research, the Corporate Residency program and the variety of ways that companies can partner with the Center. Prototypes at various phases of venture research will be shown, and designers will be on hand to show visitors examples of how the Institute can help businesses with strategic planning. The lab is a chance for visitors to meet the researchers, developers, and designers behind this work, try prototypes for themselves, and tell them what they think.

Also, on Tuesday morning, January 20, Irene Greif, Director of the Center for Social Software will give a talk "Glimpsing the Future." Dan Gruen will join her to show a new project in its early design phases, and Chieko Asakawa and Hironobu Takagi will demo the "Social Accessibility project."

Center Featured in ChannelWeb's Top-10 IBM Stories in 2008

2009-01-02T16:03:00.000-08:00

The launch of the Center for Social Software made ChannelWeb's list of top-10 IBM stories for 2008. The influential online publication, which keeps its finger on the IT pulse of the technology industry, sees the Center as an "example of IBM thinking deep thoughts about IT."

"
... [IBM] announced in September that it was creating a think tank called the Center for Social Software in its Cambridge, Mass., laboratory for developing social networking applications. IBM researchers from all over the world, along with partners and customers, will pull multiple cultural perspectives into the project and develop social networking applications geared to specific industries.
"

Beehive featured in the IBM Design Gallery

2008-12-17T16:02:00.000-08:00

The Design gallery section showcases excellent design at IBM and the designers who are responsible for it. The gallery focuses on offerings in each of four categories -- software, systems, services, and research -- and lets teams describe why they think the offering they delivered is a cut above the rest.

"The goal of the Beehive service was to aid corporate users with various people-related challenges in an enterprise, categorized as relationship building and people-sensemaking challenges. Relationship-building challenges include new employees who struggle with making connections that are important for their current project and professional growth, remote workers who have difficulties with team building and staying in touch with their team members, or employees moving on to new assignments who are not easily able to stay touch with former colleges. People-sensemaking includes the difficulties of discovering people with the right skills and common interests, or learning more about someone personally as well as professionally to facilitate making contact, or getting to know about ongoing projects and activities beyond one's immediate team."

Read More Here

Tune in to our Twitter feed

2008-10-15T16:00:00.001-07:00

The center now has a twitter account where we will be sharing information of interest with our community.
You can read our posts on this site or subscribe to our twitter feed

The Center in the news

2008-10-15T16:00:00.000-07:00

On September 17th we announced the Center for Social Software. Here's what the press - local and national - had to say about
the center:

Boston Globe: Cambridge IBM facility to focus on social links
link

"The folks at this IBM center have some very interesting tools to support collaborative views of what's going on," said Thomson-Reuters Healthcare senior vice president William Marder. "The nice part of this center is the potential to interact with some world-class smart people."

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff
September 17, 2008

Boston Business Journal: New IBM center to focus on social software
link

by Jackie Noblett
Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - 8:48 AM EDT

Xconomy: IBM Opens Social Software Research Center in Cambridge
link

"... we're talking about social software, not social networking.
We are seeing a real change from people using social software in who knows whom, and how people find people.
... A lot of what our research is about is understanding the broad impact of this category of software."

By Wade Roush
Wednesday, September 17, 2008

eWeek: IBM to Unveil Social Software Center at Interop
link

"We're going to be more focused on explicitly taking on projects that will change our route to market, that will help us work more closely with Lotus, but also develop paths to our own internal deployments that will keep us at the leading edge of social software," Greif said.

By Clint Boulton
Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Network World: IBM to launch social networking center
link

"We're going to be more focused on explicitly taking on projects that will change our route to market, that will help us work more closely with Lotus, but also develop paths to our own internal deployments that will keep us at the leading edge of social software," Greif said.

By Tim Greene
Wednesday, September 17, 2008

PC World: IBM Launches Social Software Think Tank
link

"The next generation of Web tools has the potential to significantly enhance our ability to understand and communicate what is happening to patients in the real world," said William Marder, senior VP for for research at Thomson Reuters' healthcare unit.

Paul McDougall
Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Putting it into Wordles

2008-10-10T16:00:00.000-07:00

Use Wordle to turn a block of text into a cloud that shows which words are used most frequently. The bigger the word, the more often it's used. Customize the color scheme, layout, and fonts in your wordle, and share it with others. We created this wordle from the About Us page on this site. Wordle's simple interface offers a gallery of wordles that other people have posted, instructions on how to create a cloud, and some creative suggestions for using them. It's easy and fun!

Wordle is the brainchild of Jonathan Feinberg who is a research developer in the Collaborative User Experience research group.

IBM Announces Center for Social Software

2008-09-17T16:00:00.000-07:00

Today, IBM unveiled the IBM Center for Social Software. A first of its kind facility,
the Center brings together the brightest minds from IBM to work with clients, partners,
university students and faculty, creating the industry's premier incubator for the research,
development and testing of social software.

The goal of the Center is to:

Explore, innovate and commercialize best practices in social networking.

Work with forward-thinking businesses to pilot and customize enterprise
social networks unique to their industry profile.

Create jointly funded research collaborations with government, academia,
industry and venture capital participation.

Design the future of IBM's Web 2.0 collaboration portfolio, including social discovery,
social search and new scalable architectures for social software including cloud computing.

Further social software governance: formal policies encouraging or constraining the uses
of social networking in organizations.

Develop the science of social software: Quantifying social networking.

Explore cultural differences in the use of social software.

Stay tuned for more news about our announcement.