Nicole Yankelovich Principal Investigator
Collaborative Environments Project
Sun Microsystems Laboratories
1 Network Drive, Building #2 ubur02-311 Burlington, MA 01803
Nicole Yankelovich is the Principal Investigator of the Collaborative Environments program in Sun Labs which focuses on projects to improve the experience of people working together remotely. The group's current project is a toolkit for building 3D virtual worlds called Project Wonderland. Virtual worlds created with this toolkit provide shared applications, high-fidelity audio, and a host of other features for immersive business and education collaboration. Other Collaborative Environments projects include the Sun Labs (TM) Meeting Suite for augmenting audio conferences, and Porta-Person, a remote-controlled telepresence device.
Prior to leading the Collaborative Environments effort, Nicole founded the Network Communities group in Sun Labs in September 1998. As part of the Network Communities team, Nicole worked on prototype applications aimed at improving distance collaboration. The group's first project, SharedShell, is a multi-user terminal program that works across firewalls. It is intended to help customer support engineers remotely troubleshoot customer's problems. The group also created Awarenex, a tool for helping distributed teams stay in closer touch by providing detailed presence information along with a set of communication tools.
In 1993, Nicole formed the Lab's Speech Applications Group and served as its Principal Investigator for 5 years. During her tenure in the Speech group, she designed numerous speech user interfaces including SpeechActs, published papers on the topic of speech application design, and managed an engineering team constructing APIs and building prototype applications.
Before starting the Speech group, Nicole worked on a team to prototype ideas for Sun's future workstation environment. The ideas generated by this group became the basis for the Starfire video produced by Bruce Tognazzini.
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 nine years at IRIS, she focused on user interface design in the context of an integrated, multi-user hypertext system call Intermedia.
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.
