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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.