Catalina Danis
has 15 years of experience in the analysis of human behavior in support of the design and development of applications based on leading-edge technology. Her analytic approach is to understand users in the larger context defined by their social and organizational situation. The goal of her design work is two-pronged. First, she aims to support users in the achievement of their goals by providing them a technology solution that often re-conceptualizes their tasks and extends their capabilities. Second, she focuses on evolving the underlying technology base through using it to solve real problems for real users. In her fifteen years at IBM, Catalina has been involved in the design and development of a wide variety of applications for end-users in the insurance, medical, retail, and newspaper industries. For the past three years her focus has been on developing systems rich in social cues to facilitate collaboration among participants in online environments.
Alison Lee
has extensive research and development experience in building socially-supportive and user-centered applications. For the last 7 years, Alison has been exploring paradigms, solutions, and systems that productively combine social and computational elements. At NYNEX Science and Technology, Inc, she was involved in designing and evaluating an operator workstation as well as tools and methodologies to facilitate effective communication among geographically distributed teams. At IBM, she has been involved in customer-related and research-related projects to create systems that leverage social relations, to introduce the systems to end users for evaluation and feedback, and to use these systems as vehicles for exploring and building socio-technical components. Two recent examples of this are IBM Summer Co-Op (portkey.watson.ibm.com) and the CHI 2002 Online Interactions Web site (http://www.chiplace.org). Her research focus has been identifying the socio-technical components for Web-based social interaction environments, developing tools to promote awareness and interaction in online spaces and characterizing the value of socially-aware and socially-supportive computational environments. Alison has jointly taught many tutorials on Web-based collaborative applications at CSCW, HCI, and Web conferences as well as a Columbia University course on Media Spaces and Communities. See http://www.research.ibm.com/people/a/alee for more information.
John Thomas
has been interested in Pattern Languages to cumulate knowledge since he co-organized and co-led a CHI Workshop on this topic in 1997. John received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1971 and managed a research project in the psychology of aging at Harvard Medical School before joining IBM Research where he spent 13 years conducted research in human-computer interaction, design problem-solving, software development methodologies and speech synthesis. In 1986, he built the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at NYNEX Science and Technology. The laboratory did work in expert systems, machine vision, human-computer interaction, speech recognition and advanced tools for software design. In addition, the lab was responsible for software change efforts using the Capability Maturity Model and a successful ISO-9001 registration. John rejoined IBM Research in 1998 to focus on knowledge management. In particular, this work has focused on the social, as well as the technical aspects of knowledge management. A recently published article in this general area is Thomas, J., Kellogg, W., and Erickson, T. (2001) The Knowledge Management puzzle: Human and social factors in knowledge management. IBM Systems Journal,40,4,863-884. Available on-line at http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/404/thomas.html An earlier project in this area focused on the business use of stories and storytelling. (See http://www.research.ibm.com/knowsoc/ Recent activities in the areas of Pattern Languages include participations at INTERACT 99, CHI 2000, and co-chairing a panel on Pattern Languages at CHI 2001. John also participated in a workshop on Patterns at CHI 2002 and contributed multiple patterns to the DIAC 02 conference. John has taught at a variety of educational institutions and has over 130 publications and invited presentations in computer science and psychology.
Others whose help has been substantial include
Ian Simmonds, Tom Erickson, Sherri Frizell, Doug Gordin, Juerg von Kaenel, Lauretta Jones, Paul Matchen, and David Ing
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