IBM participated in the Cambridge Science Festival

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.
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Read more here