AIC Seminar Series

Building applications that support collaboration and social interaction from the ground up requires balancing social, user interface, and technical concerns. The Web provides building blocks that make it easy to rapidly develop such applications but lacks socio-technical elements. Using the design of three social applications, I will illustrate the importance and describe examples of socio-technical components that present the social context, provide visibility of people and activities, facilitate common ground among participants, and promote social interaction and organization. I will also examine the impact of these socio-technical requirements on the infrastructure, the application model, and the content and data management capabilities of a Social Web. Then, I will discuss directions for future work on a Social Web; one that supports large-scale online interactions and collaborations for scientific computing, business, and discretionary, ad hoc, and recreational social organization purposes.

Alison Lee is a Research Staff Member at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center. She is exploring paradigms, solutions, and systems that productively combine usability, social and computational capabilities. As a Member of Technical Staff at NYNEX Science and Technology, she created tools and methodologies to support telephone operators and to facilitate communication among distributed teams. Alison received her Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto in 1992. She has published extensively at HCI, Web, and information systems conferences. She has also jointly taught many tutorials on Web-based collaborative applications.

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