James "Bo" Begole
Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Europe

Bo was previously at Sun Microsystems Laboratories but you will find him now at PARC. His research interests include user-interface technologies, human-computer interaction, collaborative computing, computer-mediated communication, distributed systems, temporal pattern analysis and mobile computing.

Selected Projects

• Lilsys - Sun Labs

Instant Messaging introduced the notion of "presence" to give callers the ability to know whether someone can be reached for communication right now. However, just because someone is "present" does not mean they are necessarily mentally receptive to being interrupted, or "available." Lilsys uses sensors to passively collect availability cues from a user's environment to detect times when the person is less (or not at all) available for communication. The system provides some measure of privacy by hiding the details of a user's context while providing important information to prospective callers.

• Rhythm Awareness - Sun Labs

Co-located coworkers share a sense of the rhythmic patterns of each other's typical activity and use this to form expectations of availability for communication and to prioritize tasks. Today, as more and more work occurs over multiple work sites, it becomes difficult for coworkers to form this sense of rhythm awareness. The goal of this research is to help restore some of the awareness of rhythmic patterns among distributed and unfamiliar coworkers.

• ConNexus and Awarenex - Sun Labs

ConNexus focused on tailoring instant messaging for enterprise users. Awarenex extended that to also bring instant messaging and other awareness cues to mobile users. Not only does Awarenex include graphical clients that run on handheld devices, PCs, and workstations, but it also includes a speech interface to awareness information for those who may only have access to a telephone.

• SharedShell - Sun Labs

The Network Communities group's first experimental software prototype involves designing a shared terminal application that works through firewalls and also provides collaboration tools such as telepointers and shared drawing.

• Flexible JAMM - Sun Labs, JavaSoft^TM and Virginia Tech

Flexible JAMM is an application-sharing system for Java^TM technology-based applications which allows multiple users to work simultaneously in a legacy single-user application. Unlike conventional application-sharing systems, Flexible JAMM supports varying styles of collaboration.

• Sieve - Virginia Tech

Sieve is a collaborative interactive visualization (CIV) environment based on the JavaBeans^TM component architecture.  Users form visualization "programs" by linking data sources, filters, and visualizer modules.

• GeoSim - Virginia Tech

GeoSim produced geography education modules consisting of tutorials and simulations.

Selected Publications

• Lilsys: Sensing Unavailability
  James "Bo" Begole
  Technical Note in Proceedings of CSCW 2004, Nov 2004.

• Beyond Instant Messaging
  John C. Tang and James "Bo" Begole
  ACM Queue, (1)8, Nov 2003, pp. 28-37.
• Rhythm Modeling, Visualizations and Applications
  James "Bo" Begole, John C. Tang and Rosco Hill
  Proceedings of the 2003 Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2003), pp. 11-20.

• Work rhythms: Analyzing visualizations of awareness histories of distributed groups
  (ACM Digital Library)
  James "Bo" Begole, John Tang, Randall Smith and Nicole Yankelovich
  Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2002), New Orleans, LA, USA, Nov 16-20, 2002, ACM Press, NY, pp.334-343.
• Exploring Web Browser History Comparisons
  (ACM Digital Library)
  Mark Bilezikjian, John C. Tang, James "Bo" Begole, Nicole Yankelovich
  Extended Abstracts of 2002 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2002), Minneapolis, MN, April 20-25, 2002, pp. 828-829.
• Resource Sharing for Replicated Synchronous Groupware
  (IEEE Digital Library, ACM Digital Library)
  James "Bo" Begole, Craig A. Struble, Clifford A. Shaffer, and Randall B. Smith
  IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, (9)6, Dec 2001, pp. 833-843.
• ConNexus to Awarenex: Extending awareness to mobile users
  John Tang, Nicole Yankelovich, James "Bo" Begole, Max Van Kleek, Francis Li, and Janak Bhalodia
  Proceedings of CHI 2001, Seattle, Washington, March 31 - April 5, 2001.
• Flexible Collaboration Transparency: Supporting Worker Independence in Replicated Application-Sharing Systems
  (ACM Digital Library)
  James "Bo" Begole, Mary Beth Rosson and Clifford A. Shaffer
  ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, (6)2, June 1999, pp. 95-132.
• Full list of publications