Venturing into Social Software
Irene Greif
IBM Fellow and Director, Collaborative User Experience
IBM Research
USA

Thursday, May 14, 4:00-5:30 pm
5 Cambridge Center, MIT Building NE25, Room 746, McClintock Room

An audio presentation of Irene Greif's seminar talk will soon be available

Abstract
IBM’s new Center for Social Software is built around Venture Research – design and deployment of scaling social systems in businesses and on the web. It’s a spin on testing software “in the wild” that has resulted in new products and insights into organizational impacts. I’ll give examples of successes and challenges, demonstrate some of our of crowd-gathering software, and invite participation.

Speaker bio
Irene Greif heads the Collaborative User Experience Group (CUE), comprised of a team of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) researchers based in Cambridge, MA. The group has historically worked most closely with Lotus product teams on collaboration software and is now extending its impact to other parts of IBM’s Software Group -- to support collaboration among software developers -- and to IBM's service businesses. In 2008, she announced the opening of the Center for Social Software at IBM in Cambridge, with programs for outreach to academia and corporate partners.

Irene is a former faculty member of Computer Science at University of Washington and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She headed a research group in the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science which developed shared calendar, co-authoring, and real-time collaboration systems. She is a fellow of both the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Association of Computing Machinery (ACM.) Irene was inducted into the Women In Technology International (WITI) Hall of Fame in 2000.

Irene joined Lotus in 1987, formed Lotus Research in 1992, and merged that group into the IBM Research Division in 2000. Recent innovations from her group include the core features now shipping in Lotus Connections -- social bookmarking (dogear) and business activities – as well as free internet services like Many Eyes, a site for collaborative visualization.

Irene received her S.B. in Mathematics, her S.M. and her PhD. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, all from MIT.

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