Nicole Yankelovich Principal Investigator
Collaborative Environments Project
Sun Microsystems Laboratories
1 Network Drive, Building #2 ubur02-311 Burlington, MA 01803
Nicole Yankelovich is a Principal Investigator in Sun Labs focusing on user experience research. She currently leads a project called Collaborative Environments. This umbrella project involves designing and prototyping technologies to help people working together remotely. Several technologies developed under this umbrella are focused on improving distributed meetings. For example, the Sun Labs(TM) Meeting Suite augments audio conferences with high-fidelity, stereo audio as well as with the names of the people who are speaking. The Connected Conference Room solves problems for people in distributed meetings that involve one or more conference rooms.
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.
