Jennifer Thom: Why She is a Woman to Watch

This morning, Jenn Thom was one of 20 women honored at the 2012 Women to Watch Breakfast sponsored by Mass High Tech. The MHT annual program is nine years strong, and each year names honorees in various fields. This year the program has recognized women in tech and life sciences who are thought leaders in their field and shaping the future of their industries for years to come, and honorees were selected from more than 100 nominations.

Why Jenn Thom? 
Jenn is a Research Scientist in the Visual Communications Lab, part of the Collaborative User Experience Group at IBM Research in Cambridge. She is a rising star in the field of human-computer interaction and its intersection with social business technology. In 2009, she received a Ph.D. from Cornell University, where her dissertation work focused on how users express territorial behaviors in online collaborative spaces. Her current research focus includes computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW), intercultural communication and collaboration, and social networking. As social media moves beyond the consumer market and is rapidly being adopted and adapted by the corporate world, Thom is studying the acceptance and usage of social media by companies and how it affects user interactions and collaboration.

In November 2011, her research in gamification – the use of game design techniques in non-game technologies - was featured in the Wired magazine article, IBM Proves Playing Virtual Games is Serious Business.  In February 2012, this research was cited in the Daily SEO Blog article, "What Community Builders Can Learn From Research."  You can find her current list of research publications in ResearchGate.

In March 2012, at South by Southwest, Jenn was invited to be a panelist on the Maps of Time, Data as Narrative panel (now podcast) - a discussion about the relationship between visualized data and the histories we tell.

In April, the MHT Review spotlighted Jenn in this article, "2012 Women to Watch: Jennifer Thom."
We know we will hear more from and about Jenn Thom. Congratulations on well deserved recognition.

Open Pediatrics: Web-based Critical Pediatric Medical Care for All - a talk with Dr. Jeffrey Burns of Children's Hospital Boston

What:  First Spring 2012 speaker series talk 
When:  May 14, 3:30-05:00
Where: IBM Research, Cambridge, MA
Register here on Eventbrite (map and directions included)

The IBM Center for Social Business welcomes Dr. Jeffrey P. Burns, a game changer in pediatric care, who has an amazing story to tell. He will share a journey that began as a dream to help pediatric medical staff in places around the world who did not have access to critical knowledge they needed to save kids lives. 

While watching the Masters in 2009, he saw an interactive "see and do" web site he thought could do exactly what he wanted. As it turned out, this site was designed by IBM Interactive, with a group based in Cambridge. After a three-year collaboration between Dr. Burns and a Cambridge-based IBM Interactive team led by Adam Cutler, Open Pediatrics is a reality.

The soon-to-be-released web-based educational application will be a resource for pediatric critical care givers around the world. By harnessing the reach of the Internet, access to the latest knowledge about effective health care will no longer be bottle necked within the walls of institutions. It can now be shared instantly so that clinicians across the globe can gain access to life-saving information at any time.

This comprehensive, continually updated, and peer-reviewed knowledge exchange platform is dedicated to providing multimedia and interactive educational resources to physicians and nurses on optimal care of the critically ill child.  The site's mission is to provide information on demand, curricular learning maps for training clinicians, and a platform for knowledge exchange and collaboration between care providers around the world.

The beta release will include 1000 users in hospitals across six continents. A total of 9 modules will cover a range of topics pertinent to the care of critically ill children. Each topic will include expert content, including video lectures and demonstrations, pre- and post- topic knowledge assessments, and best practice protocols and guidelines. When applicable, a module will include a simulator or avatar-based simulations for more comprehensive and interactive learning.

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

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

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

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

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.

Register on Eventbrite  Andrew McAfee at IBM

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

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.