Academic Interviews

We spoke with Professor Jim Herbsleb from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute and Wendy Kellogg from the IBM TJ Watson Research center to discuss their views on streamlining group collaboration through technology.

Wendy Kellogg spoke with us about distributing tasks and task visibility in a shared space. In her prototype, she anonymized public information about individual progress to display pertinent information about a distributed task while maintaining a sense of privacy.

We also discussed the cultural and social issues concerning remote workers with Professor Jim Herbsleb. In his work with ConnectIcon, an Instant Messenger with a built-in awareness system, he explored a solution to connecting workers across different mediums. From his research, he saw tasks as a lightweight, bottom-up object in group workflows.

Link to PDFs:

"A Social Proxy for Distributed Tasks: Design and Evaluation of a Working Prototype" - Wendy Kellogg

"ConnectIcon" - Jim Herbsleb