Joe McCarthy, NRC
Friendsters at Work: Displaying Social Media Streams in the Workplace

Friday, August 17th, 3pm
Yahoo! Research Berkeley
1950 University Ave., Berkeley
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/226395/

ABSTRACT:
Online social media services enable people to share many aspects of their personal interests and passions with friends, acquaintances and strangers. Much of the attention on such services – in the traditional media as well as scientific literature – has focused on the use and impact of such services on interconnections and interactions among friends and family. Although there is a growing appreciation for the value of friendships in work settings, relatively little attention has been devoted to how sharing through social media services can help foster stronger relationships in the workplace. At Nokia Research Center Palo Alto, we are embarking on an investigation into the use of a new generation of proactive displays – large computer displays that can sense and respond in contextually appropriate ways to the people nearby. Our new Context, Content and Community Collage proactive display application is running on 8 LCD touchcomputers recently deployed throughout our lab. Nearby people are sensed via Bluetooth phones, and the response is an incrementally generated ambient collage of photos from Flickr profiles they have chosen to share. The presentation will highlight the motivations, goals, design and early deployment experiences with the proactive display application. This research is part of Context, Content and Community project at NRC Palo Alto, and was made possible primarily through the tireless efforts of three of our interns, Max Harper, Ben Congleton and Jiang Bian.

BIOGRAPHY:
Joe McCarthy is a Principal Instigator at Nokia Research Center Palo Alto, where he is committed to the design, development and deployment of technologies to help people relate to one another. Joe's career includes earlier roles as an entrepreneur, research scientist, professor, consultant, and musician. Other roles currently played include husband, father and wine aficionado. Additional information about Joe can be found at his official web site (http://research.nokia.com/people/joe_mccarthy) and his unsanctioned weblog (http://gumption.typepad.com/blog).


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