Projects in CORPS

These are a sample of current projects going on in CORPS.

Cooperation Awareness and Privacy

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 as a Design Requirement

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

Success Factors of Information Visualization Systems

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 Visualization

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

Security and Usability

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

Fluid Information Spaces

Conventional information systems force people to organize their information according to fixed structures such as hierarchies and database schemas. By contrast, in everyday activity, the ways that people work with information are much more fluid. Information organization emerges from how people interact with information, rather than being predefined, and different people have different ways of organizing the same information.

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

Expertise Recommendation

Expertise networks are technical augmentations of the ad-hoc social networks that enable people to answer questions, accomplish tasks, and find information. Technologies to create, enhance, and maintain these networks will be important uses of the Net. We have been conducting studies into expertise seeking in technical organizations, and developing prototype technologies that reflect our findings.

Contact: Mark Ackerman, Wayne Lutters

Organizational Memory

Information technology has enabled organizations to generate and retain mountains of information. Unfortunately, many organizations suffer from "infoglut." They have the information they need, but they don't know they have it. Or, knowing they have it, they can't find it. From the perspective of the organization, one method of managing its intellectual resources is to attempt to augment its organizational memory. If an organization learns, then the result should be available later.

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

Information Needs in Health Care

We focus on collaborative information seeking in health care organizations. Our goal is to understand the roles that technology and organizational norms play in helping determine when and how information is sought and used by groups and individuals. We closely examine the relationship between the information seeking methods of the various health-care workers and technologies such as the computer-based patient record. The findings from our fieldwork will be used to design systems that support collaborative information seeking by patient care teams.

Contact: Wanda Pratt, Madhu Reddy