The aim of the project is to help people who collaborate with each other electronically and who possibly work in different locations and time zones negotiate a policy for disseminating group awareness information that balances the demand for such information with individual privacy preferences. The ultimate result is likely to be a software tool that recognizes conflicts between demands for group awareness information and for privacy, and helps group members negotiate a compromise.
Contact: Alfred Kobsa
Privacy demands of Internet users as well as international (and future national) privacy legislation have an impact on the collection of personal data in web-based systems. This project studies specifically the impacts on "personalized" web-based systems, which cater their interaction to each individual user, collect considerable amounts of personal data for this purpose, and "lay them in stock" for possible future adaptation. This project analyzes and documents these privacy requirements.
Contact: Alfred Kobsa
Research in information visualization aims at leveraging human perceptual abilities for data analysis, by presenting information not as numbers and text but in visual form. Effective visual displays must therefore be designed in such a way that users can easily obtain an overview of the data, spot outliers, patterns and correlations, and see the changes that will occur if some parameters become altered. Visualizations need to make such significant facts salient for human perception. This identifies "success factors" of visualization systems for multivariate data, by conducting experiments both with analysts working individually on a computer screen, and with groups of analysts collaborating in front of a large-sized display.
Contact: Alfred Kobsa
Software systems are large, complex artifacts over which many people work. The effectiveness of cooperation between developers depends on their understandings of the structure and operation of the code base, and the activities of their colleages. However, conventional software tools don't focus explicitly on these problems of software understanding. We're exploring the use of visual properties to explain both the static and the dynamic properties of large software systems.
Contact: Paul Dourish
In many systems, security and usability seem to be opposite design concerns; making systems more secure seems to make them less usable. However, usability is critically important for security, because a system is only as secure as the way that it's used, and the way that it's used depends on how users understand and approach it. Based on studies of how people manage security in software systems as an everyday, practical problem, we're developing new models that will help people understand security concerns in the systems that they use.
Contact: Paul Dourish, David Redmiles
We are looking at ways to build information systems that provide better support for informal information management for personal, group and organizational work. This includes both information infrastructures based on attribute storage models, and novel interaction approaches such as spatial hypertext.
Contact: Paul Dourish
Contact: Mark Ackerman, Wayne Lutters
A standard connotation of organizational memory, that that can captured in a written record, is only one form of organizational memory. The most obvious places include information repositories such as corporate manuals, databases, filing systems, and even stories. Additionally, individuals are a prime location for retention of the organization's knowledge. However, organizational memory can be retained in many other places, including organizational culture, processes, and structures. Thus, information technology can support organizational memory in two ways, either by making recorded knowledge retrievable or by making individuals with knowledge accessible. Our work has been concerned with both possibilities.
Contact: Mark Ackerman
Contact: Wanda Pratt, Madhu Reddy