July 18, 2004

The Social Computing Research Lab List

Even though many of the great old research firms may not be what they once were (PARC has lost its Xerox moniker; AT&T has lost much of its old social computing staff), industry-aligned and sponsored social computer research is far from dead.

This has come up in the context of my job search I'm leaning toward industry, largely because the sort of things that I do seem to connect very well to current industrial interests in a number of different ways. Industry seems to be the place today where research can have short- or medium-term effects on product. (Of course, there's still a difficult balance of how to get those products into the real world, a venture with mixed results)

I've run into quite a few places that are doing interesting things. Here's a brief overview of labs you might want to know about: places whose publications are worth monitoring.

  1. Microsoft maintains a community technologies group, a social computing group, and an adaptive systems group.
  2. IBM has labs in Cambridge working on collaboration, Almaden working on user experience, and New York
  3. Intel's "lablets" have a People and Practices group, as well as teams interested in social computing at both Seattle and Berkeley
  4. FXPAL is an American presence of Fuji-Xerox that does research in Palo Alto
  5. Hewlett-Packard's information dynamics lab has interesting work on social networks and social structure
  6. PARC has projects in Sensemaking and Community
  7. MERL is an American presence for Mitsubishi in Cambridge
  8. MITRE is a government-oriented research organization with interests in collaboration and information solutions
  9. AT&T has a strong Information visualization group. (It is a peculiar habit of mine to think that info viz is a form of social computing.)
  10. Google seems to maintain a research staff in a variety of cool stuff, but they don't talk about it much. (Am I just missing a major Google publishing venue?) Still, anyone who would bring in danah as an intern knows where to be looking.
  11. NASA has research on human centered computing, including some social and groupware research
  12. Nokia, Boeing, NIST, and Sun also have various forms of research in these areas...

Update: Know of anything I'm missing? Please let me know.
Update: Added Boeing and PARC.
Update 7/20: Corrected language about Intel

July 18, 2004 01:47 PM | TrackBack | in Other
Comments