Staff & Roles

Nicole Yankelovich: Principal Investigator

Nicole was the Principal Investigator for the Network Communities Group. She founded the group with John Tang in September 1998. Nicole has a background in user interface research and design with a long-term interest in the design of collaborative systems.

In 1993, Nicole formed the Sun Microsystem Laboratories Speech Applications Group and served as the Principal Investigator. Prior to joining Sun in 1991, Nicole worked as Project Coordinator at the Brown University Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS). During her 9 years at IRIS, she focused on user interface design in the context of an integrated, multi-user hypertext system.

Nicole has published a variety of papers on collaborative systems, speech applications, user interface design, and hypertext, and she has served on the organizing and program committees of conferences such as CSCW, CHI, UIST, ASSETS, and Hypertext.

Nicole Yankelovich.

John was the co-founder of the Network Communities group and served as the design lead for the project. His research interests include using a combination of qualitative and quantitative observational methods to study collaborative work activity. Informed by those studies, he works with engineers to design and implement working prototypes to better support their collaborative work.

Before forming the Network Communities group, John worked in the COCO group. The COCO group was an advanced development group that explored prototypes to support collaboration. One of the early COCO prototypes led to the development of the ShowMe Whiteboard product. His previous research focused on designing prototypes that applied audio-video technology to support collaboration, and conducting studies to observe how they were used.

Bo was the group's lead software engineer. He was responsible for developing prototype collaborative software and supporting experimental uses of these prototypes.

Bo's professional interests include collaborative computing, distributed systems, object-oriented analysis, design and development, and interactive visualization. His dissertation research focused on techniques to minimize a software designer's concern for common problems in the development of collaborative systems. These problems include efficient network usage, sharing pre-existing software, flexible support of multiple styles of collaboration, and providing communication cues to collaborators. Bo received a BS in 1992 in mathematics from Virginia Commonwealth University, an MS in 1994 and a PhD in 1998 in computer science from Virginia Tech.

Rosco, a senior at University of Waterloo, worked with Network Communities during the fall of 2002. Rosco worked on analysis of presence data records and devised algorithms to model rhythmic patterns in the data.

Nick is a Ph.D. student at MIT. He was a member of Network Communities during the summer of 2002. Nick added a novel away-status interface to Awarenex and conducted analysis of rhythmic activity records.

Mark, a student at Berkeley, joined the Network Communities for the summer of 2001. He participated in adding features to Awarenex and working on a new project.

Mark's interests include collaborative and educational software design, alternative interfaces, studying user experience, and the art of visualization. At Berkeley Mark was an undergraduate researcher in the Group for User Interface Research; a group led by James Landay and Marti Hearst. He worked on designing collaborative educational software for kids called GENEY. He also worked on a task-centered tangible interface for web site information design called Outpost.

Max, a student at M.I.T., joined the Network Communities for the summer of 1999. During that summer, he and Janak Bhalodia participated in the initial phases of software and user interface design for an instant messaging client.

Max currently spends his days as an undergraduate at M.I.T. studying software engineering. He is sometimes mistaken for a graduate student at the MIT Media Laboratory, where he works (and occasionally lives) as an research assistant. Although he still cannot play Ultimate Frisbee, he is hoping that his sharpened software-engineering and ping-pong skills will induce the Network Communities group to invite him back some day.

Francis joined the Network Communities group for the Summer of 2000 as a graduate student from U.C. Berkeley. He worked on the initial design and implementation of Awarenex with Max and the rest of the group.

Francis' interests are in human-computer interaction, including user interface design, computer mediated communication, and collaboration tools. Francis received a B.A. degree in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley in 1998.

Janak, a student at Stanford University, joined the Network Communities for the summer of 1999 and worked with Max Van Kleek on the design of an instant messaging client.

Janak is currently pursuing his master's degree, specializing in Human-Computer Interaction, in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. He graduated with a BS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 1998. Janak also did a lot of design and development for the Classroom 2000 project while he was at Georgia Tech.

His interests in the field of computing include interaction design, mobile and ubiquitous computing, distributed systems, and networking. He is also interested in high-tech stocks and startups.

Eleanor joined the Network Communities group for the 1998 fall semester, conducting interviews, participating in observations, and assisting with data analysis.

She is currently enrolled as a doctoral student in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University.