Center takes the lead on transparent text with Symposium

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:

• The Noisy Channel - Day 1
• The Noisy Channel - Day 2
• Nieman Journalism Lab - Five projects on the frontier of text-based data analysis and visualization

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

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!

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 he’d laid them out in interesting angles on the page, and he even had the dot of an “i” 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

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