H O T R E S E A R C H

Applying ISR’s Interactive andCollaborative TechnologiesExpertise

ISR is well known for its expertise in severalrealms of software research, including soft-ware engineering, software testing and analy-sis, and interactive and collaborative tech-nologies (ICT). Our ICT group ofresearchers has grown in numbers andstature over the past few years, and includesMark Ackerman, Paul Dourish, AlfredKobsa, Gloria Mark, Bonnie Nardi, andDavid Redmiles. As an exemplar of thisgroup, we feature Gloria Mark’s research,which focuses on the “human side of com-puting.” (For more glimpses of ISR ICTresearch, see the article introducing new fac-ulty member Bonnie Nardi on p. 2 and thearticles on ICT graduate student DanyelFisher on pp. 2 and 6.)

As with other ICT faculty, Mark studies theuse of computer and information technolo-gies in real-life situations, including theirorganizational and societal impact, and howtechnologies can be better designed to sup-port human needs. Her specific interests arein distributed and collaborative technology-aided work, and how technologies can sup-

port large scaleteam-to-team col-laborations. Shehas done severalstudies of collo-cated and distrib-uted softwaredesign teams,including severalstudies at Boeing.Gloria is one ofeight ISR facultyresearchers cur-rently examining

distributed software development as part ofour $1.8 million NSF Information andTechnology Research grant (see article in theFall/Winter 2002 ISR Connector).

In her studies of distributed and collabora-tive technology-aided work, Mark has foundthat people face difficulties when collaborat-ing at a distance, which have resulted in costsranging from time-to-market delays to the

Challenger disaster. Remote collaboratorssuffer from limited social information in thecommunication process, as well as differingunderlying meanings normally built overtime among face-to-face (“collocated”) teammembers. Mark’s research suggests there areways to mitigate the “space between” differ-ences on both sides of the human-computerinteraction divide.

On the computer side of that divide, inform-ing technology improvement is one goal ofMark’s research. The research finding thattechnology should convey more social infor-mation has been addressed by newer tech-nologies such as HDTV video conferencing,room-sized real-time video displays, and gridtechnologies. Conveying larger views of peo-ple and data, however, has not closed the“space between.” By studying how technolo-gy supports disparate team cultures in devel-oping common meanings, Mark and her stu-dents have found an additional technologicalneed for making underlying meanings morevisible to all collaborators.

On the human side of the “space between,”Mark’s studies of warroom environments, inwhich teams work together synchronously inall phases of the project, have shown that

FALL/WINTER 2003 http://www.isr.uc i .edu

I N S T I T U T E F O R S O F T WA R E R E S E A R C H / U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A L I F O R N I A , I R V I N E

R E S E A R C H B R I E F S

New ISR Awards include NSF grants for: “Usable Security: Towards a Trustable InformationInfrastructure” ($600,000, Paul Dourish and David Redmiles), “Privacy-enabling Designof Personalized Websites” ($360,000, Alfred Kobsa), “Research Directions for ContinuousDesign in Free/Open Source Software Systems” ($245,000, Walt Scacchi and LesGasser), “Dynamic Process Enactment, Discovery, and Recovery“ ($445,000, Walt Scacchiand John Noll) as well as a grant from Intel for “Trustable Technology: Balancing Privacyand Accessibility in Mobile, Ad Hoc Networks” ($280,000, Paul Dourish and DavidRedmiles).

Bonnie Nardi has been invited to give several invited talks: the opening keynote at TheColston Research Symposium at the University of Bristol, England in the Graduate Schoolof Education and Department of Computer Science conference on March 22, 2004; aninvited talk on March 23 at the Symposium on Learning and Technology at Work, at theInstitute of Education, University of London; and an invited talk at the University ofWashington at the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities on June 4. For moreinformation on Bonnie Nardi, see Focus on Faculty, page 2.

Paul Dourish recently gave two keynote presentations: 2003 Usability ProfessionalsAssociation (UPA) conference (with Dan Russell, IBM) and OzCHI (Australia CHI) 2003.He will also give an invited talk at the IEEE Symposia on Human Centric Computing(HCC 2004) in September 2004.

Paul Dourish’s research in awareness was covered in the Danish engineering pressIngeniøren, September issue. http://www.ing.dk/awareness. Ingeniøren is widely circulated inDenmark, reaching every practicing engineer in the country.

Alfred Kobsa received one of the two Best Paper Awards for his paper on “PerformanceEvaluation of User Modeling Servers Under Real-World Workload Conditions” presentedat the 9th International Conference on User Modeling, Johnstown, PA, in June 2003. Thearticle is available online at http://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/papers/2003-UM-kobsa.pdf

André van der Hoek and his student Chris Lüer presented a paper entitled “Architecture-Based Program Compaction” at the Workshop on Reuse in Constrained Environments atOOPSLA 2003 in November.

I N T H I S I S S U E :

2-Meet Bonnie Nardi2-Danyel Fisher’s HCI Research

4, 5-Student News, Events5-ISR Technical Reports

6-Research Forum

ISRConnector

Mark

2 http://www.isr.uc i .edu

specially chosen facilitators can double proj-ect productivity. By continually monitoringthe collaboration landscape visually andaurally, picking out important activity fociand trouble spots, and providing resources asneeded, facilitators keep teams from boggingdown. Dubbing the resulting dynamic“extreme collaboration,” Mark found thecombination electronic-and-social environ-ment maximized communication and infor-mation flow among synchronously workingproject teams for super-fast project comple-tion. For example, NASA/JPL’s facilitatedTeam X can design a new space mission pro-posal within a week, defining all aspects ofthe mission in just three sessions of threehours each (with some pre and post work).

A recent Wall Street Journal article(November 10, 2003, p. B1) features anotherof Mark’s research projects exploring thehuman side of computing. With her studentVictor Gonzalez, Mark has found that tech-nologies and the current pace of life havepushed multi-tasking to the point wherepeople are choosing to task switch on theaverage of every three minutes, if not inter-rupted otherwise. This research promises toinform technology design regarding how tokeep people’s thoughts straight while multi-tasking across different projects and tools.

Much of Mark’s research has resonated withindividuals and companies trying to recon-cile a shrinking world with technologiesunequal to new needs. Effective virtual col-location—being in the “global room” by wayof technology, if not physically in the samelocation—has become a necessity for inter-national, multinational, and global compa-nies conducting distributed operations acrossdistance. Her research has been applied indiverse companies that depend on distrib-uted communications, including Boeing,Intel, NASA/JPL and State Street. We look toMark and other ICT researchers to informnew technologies on better ways to commu-nicate and share information in the globalroom.

Gloria Mark can be reached at (949) 824-5955, gmark@uci.edu.

F O C U S O N F A C U L T Y

Meet Bonnie NardiBonnie Nardi (http://darrouzet-nardi.net/bonnie), Associate Professor ofInformation and Computer Science at UCIrvine, is a noted anthropologist specializingin the study of technology. She’s put her

expertise to good use at Agilent, Apple andAT&T, helping software designers create peo-ple-friendly tools that promote interpersonalrelationships. She holds several patents forsuch tools with former colleagues at Apple,

Hewlett-Packardand AT&T.

With an undergrad-uate anthropologydegree from UCBerkeley and aPh.D. from UCIrvine’s School ofSocial Scienceunder her belt,Bonnie spent a yeardoing postdoctoralresearch in Samoa

and has since done field work from NewGuinea to Silicon Valley. Her research inter-ests are user interface design, collaborativework, computer-mediated communication,and theoretical approaches to technologydesign and evaluation.

Bonnie is currently doing studies on blog-ging (weblogs, or blogs, are online journals)and on scientific collaborations across orga-nizational, distance and other boundaries.The blogging study examines personal com-munications of “ordinary bloggers” and theirmotivations for creating and maintainingblogs. Blogs, a series of archived Internetpostings for a targeted audience, have gainedenormous popularity and attention recently,impacting social groups ranging from close-knit friends to anonymous Western worldnews watchers.

Widely published in the field of human-

computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported cooperative work, Bonnie is cur-rently working on a co-authored book forMIT press, Acting with Technology: ActivityTheory and Interaction Design, one in a seriesexploring the rich social and physical con-texts of technology. This book continuesBonnie’s extensions of activity theory, aphilosophical framework developed by agroup of Russian psychologists that lendsitself well as a framework for understandingHCI. Bonnie is largely responsible forspreading the term “information ecology”with her co-authored book, InformationEcologies: Using Technology with Heart. She ison the editorial board of First Monday, apeer-reviewed online journal devoted to theInternet.

Bonnie can be reached at nardi@ics.uci.edu,(949) 824-6534.

Making Computers WorkBetter for People “People,” says graduate student DanyelFisher (Paul Dourish, advisor), “are every-where.” He’s referring to the tracks andtraces of individuals and their relationshipsthat are embedded in every computer sys-tem, but whose richness has previously beenunderutilized. Fisher’s people orientationcomes naturally. Fisher, who expects to com-plete his Ph.D. next summer, is a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher inthe Information & CollaborativeTechnologies (ICT) group at ISR.

Fisher’s research examines the traces people

W A N T T O G E T I N V O L V E D ?

Sponsoring ISR has many benefits. It enables your company to form closer ties withour faculty and students, puts you on the fast track to our leading edge research,and gives you first crack at our experimental software tools. Choose from five levelsof sponsorship:

Support Level Annual Contribution Contribution goes to:

Friend $10,000 ISR’s general research fund.Affiliate—Research $30,000 A designated ISR research area.Affiliate—Visiting $40,000 Host Faculty’s research area.Affiliate—Grad Student $60,000 Graduate Student fellowship.Partner $100,000 or more Large-scale research project.

For more information about ISR Sponsorship, please contact:

Dr. Susan J. Knightsknight@uci.edu(949) 824-5927

Nardi

FALL/WINTER 2003 3

leave behind in all computer systems. Emailaddress books, PDA address books, clientdatabases, shared drives and scheduling pro-grams all house data that comes from people.More subtly, so do email files, instant mes-sages, and other communications that signalpeople are interacting. Together the underly-ing communications patterns speak untoldvolumes about a computer user’s social net-works. Fisher is capturing this data, studyingit, and putting it to optimum use in newtools for computer users.

One of a suite ofdeveloping tools,Fisher’s tool Soylent(homage to themovie SoylentGreen) applies adeep understandingof how single-usercomputer experi-ences carry interac-tive information.This data is inte-grated to reveal col-

lective activities of the user within his largeroverlapping social work- and leisure-scapes.Harnessing this “everyday collaboration”helps people coordinate their work and otheractivities with others. Using highly selectiveinformation from email archives, Soylent tiesmessages into a social network and ordersthem into a timeline chart. It uses thisorganized data to provide value-added emailsystem information automatically. If you seeyourself in any of the following problem sce-narios, Soylent and other tools being devel-oped by Fisher can provide solutions.

■ A call comes in from a potential clientwhose name you don’t immediately recog-nize. While conversing, you realize you’dbeen in touch several months ago, so youquickly skim through email records on theclient’s name. Nothing surfaces becausethe mail client is poor at checking carbon-copied names.

■ You need to refer to a document prepareda few months ago and emailed to a col-league, but it’s tucked away somewhere onyour hard drive. You locate it through aninbox search by skimming through severalalternative files, subfiles, and documentversions. For your current project, yousave the document to disk for theumpteenth time.

■ Having recently been laid off, you preparefor a job search. Knowing it’s a good timefor social network maintenance, you startto catch up on old mail. Unfortunately,you don’t remember an old friend, now arecruiter in your field, with whom you’vefallen out of touch.

■ A manager, preparing for an end-of-weekreport, once again spends an hour skim-ming email from the past week, trying toremember the week’s full set of projects.The week’s big crisis has masked a numberof accomplishments which don’t make itinto the report.

■ A team member, trying to track down adecision made several months ago, can’tquite remember who was involved in theteam at the time. Was that when the con-sultant was involved? It takes some time todig through the mass of old messages anddocuments to figure out who was involved.

Fisher’s visualization expertise lends itself touser-friendly enhancements in his noveltools. Information is conveyed to the useron screen through diagrams. The diagrambelow shows the Soylent network view,which quickly reveals different groups withdifferent roles.

The upper bar in the first chart, top right,shows the number of incoming/outgoingemail messages between the user (the centralblue box) and one correspondent within asocial network, while the bottom bar showsthe number of associated incoming/outgoingattachments. The second chart, top right,highlights a different set of connectionsbetween the user and another correspondentwithin a different social network.

You can try Soylent for yourself, using thevisualizations and tools available athttp://www.isr.uci.edu/projects/soylent/.

Fisher has had several opportunities to workin industry while developing his interests inonline social spaces. As an information

design consultant, he has evaluated userinterfaces, business strategies and securitysystems for small business software distribu-tion and adoption. He has also interned attwo major research laboratories, IBMAlmaden and Lotus, designing and imple-menting a variety of software projects.

At IBM, Fisher worked with the USER groupat Almaden Research on a web-based inter-face for electronic social interaction.WebPlaces, as it is called, follows users’movements to understand their interests, andallows users doing similar projects to com-municate. In 2000, Fisher designed andimplemented a distributed online survey andanalysis tool at Lotus Research. The Javaapplet for Lotus Notes allowed users to learnabout email use patterns, including folders,threads and social network participation. In2002, he was invited to work at IBMResearch (formerly Lotus) in Cambridge,Massachusetts, following up on workspaceresearch (see UCI-ISR Tech Report 02-2).

Fisher received a BS in Computer Scienceand BA in Philosophy from WashingtonUniversity St. Louis in Spring 1997, and anM.S. in Computer Science from UC Berkeleyin May 2000. He subsequently transferred toUCI to complete his graduate education.

How did Fisher get to UCI? While at UCBerkeley, Fisher took a course with visitingsociologist Barry Wellman (U. Toronto).“Barry is responsible for giving me a newway of looking at the world,” said Fisher.Fisher later heard a talk by Paul Dourish,then at Xerox PARC. The rest, as they say, ishistory—Dourish left PARC to join the ICTgroup at ISR/UCI, and Fisher soon followed.

More about Fisher’s research athttp://www.isr.uci.edu/~danyelf. He can bereached at (949) 824-1338; danyelf@uci.edu.

D I D Y O U K N O W ?

ISR's xADL software architecturetechnology has been adopted byU.S. and European space agencies.

Fisher

4 http://www.isr.uc i .edu

I S R S T U D E N TN E W S B R I E F S

Anita Sarma (A. van der Hoek, advi-sor) was accepted to the doctoralsymposium at ESEC/FSE 2003 inHelsinki, Finland in September. Her

paper was titled“ConfigurationManagementWorkspaceAwareness forDistributedSoftwareDevelopment.”Sarma will alsopresent at theAssociation forConfigurationand DataManagement

(ACDM) Symposium on SCM, inJanuary 2004. Sarma was a recipientof a 2003 ICS Summer Fellowship.

Emily Oh Navarro (A.v.d. Hoek, advi-sor), was awarded the AchievementRewards for College Scientists (ARCS)

Fellowship for2003-04 and2004-05. Thisfellowship isgranted to aca-demically out-standing UnitedStates citizensstudying tocomplete theirdegrees in sci-ence, medicineand engineer-ing.

Scott Hendrickson, Eric Dashofy,John Georgas (R. Taylor, advisor)and Ping Chen, Chris van derWesthuizen, Matt Critchlow (A.v.d. Hoek advisor) participated in theposter session at the NASA/JPL SpaceMission Challenges for InformationTechnology (SMC-IT) 2003. Theirposters included “A Tool Set forChange Management and FeaturePropagation within a Product FamilyArchitecture”, “DistributedArchitecture-Based Run-TimeEvolution”, and “An Approach forTracing and UnderstandingAsynchronous Architectures”.

Chris Van der Westhuizen (A. van derHoek, advisor) gave a presentation onMénage at ICSM 2003 (Int’l Conf. onSoftware Maintenance). As a result,

I S R E V E N T S S C H E D U L E Mark your calendars now!

September 19, 2003UCI ISR - NSF Workshop on Continuous Software Design in Open SourceSoftware Communities Faculty Host: Walt ScacchiICS2 136

November 7, 2003Distinguished Speaker: Anthony FinkelsteinUniversity College London“Check - Report - Repair”2:00-3:30 p.m., McDonnell Douglas Auditorium

December 16-18, 2003Int’l Workshop on Community-Driven Evolution of Knowledge Artifacts Faculty Host: David RedmilesICS2 136

January 16, 2004Distinguished Speaker: James A. LandayUniversity of Washington“Using Design Patterns to Create Cross-Platform Web Sites ”2:00-3:30 p.m., McDonnell Douglas Auditorium

January 30, 2004Distinguished Speaker: Mary Jean HarroldGeorgia Institute of Technology“Testing and Analysis of Next Generation Software”2:00-3:30 p.m., McDonnell Douglas Auditorium

February 13, 2004Distinguished Speaker: Judy OlsonUniversity of Michigan“What is the Cost (Benefit) of Being Remote: Organizational Simulation as a Tool forStudying Team Work”1:30-3:00 p.m., McDonnell Douglas Auditorium

May 7, 2004Distinguished Speaker: Susan Leigh StarUniversity of California, San Diego“Residual Categories: A Challenge for Ethics, Information Systems, and Communication ”2:00-3:30 p.m., McDonnell Douglas Auditorium

June 20042004 ISR Research ForumLook for more information online and in the next issue of the ISR Connector.

For more information: http://www.isr.uci.edu/events.html

Finkelstein

Navarro

Harrold

Sarma

he and van der Hoek are examining poten-tial collaborations with the VrijeUniversiteit in Amsterdam and UFRJ, a

Brazilian University.

For more information on students:http://www.isr.uci.edu/people.html

FALL/WINTER 2003 5

ISR Technical Reports Available OnlineISR technical reports present information resulting from student and faculty researchcarried out under the auspices of the Institute. They showcase early results not availablein print elsewhere. ISR technical reports are available on the ISR Web site in PDF foreasy download and printing. Recent reports include:

“Use Case, Goal, and Scenario Analysis of the Euronet System: Comparing Methodsand Results”Thomas A. Alspaugh and Annie I. Antón, UCI-ISR-03-12

“User Experiments with Tree Visualization Systems”Alfred Kobsa, UCI-ISR-03-11

“Decentralized Software Evolution”Peyman Oreizy and Richard N. Taylor, UCI-ISR-03-10

“PACE: An Architectural Style for Trust Management in Decentralized Applications”Girish Suryanarayana, Justin Erenkrantz, Scott Hendrickson, and Richard N. Taylor,UCI-ISR-03-9

“Extending the REpresentational State Transfer (REST) Architectural Style forDecentralized Systems”Rohit Khare and Richard N. Taylor, UCI-ISR-03-8

“An Empirical Study of Scenario Similarity Measures”Thomas A. Alspaugh, Annie I. Antón, and Laura J. Davis, UCI-ISR-03-7

“Free Software: A Case Study of Software Development in a Virtual OrganizationalCulture”Margaret S. Elliott and Walt Scacchi, UCI-ISR-03-6

“Security Day-to-Day: User Strategies for Managing Security as an Everyday,Practical Problem”Paul Dourish, Rebecca E. Grinter, Brinda Dalal, Jessica Delgado de la Flor, andMelissa Joseph, UCI-ISR-03-5

“Supporting Distributed and Decentralized Projects: Drawing Lessons from theOpen Source Community”Justin R. Erenkrantz and Richard N. Taylor, UCI-ISR-03-4

All ISR technical reports are available at: http://www.isr.uci.edu/tech-reports.html

For more information, contact:

Debra A. BrodbeckTechnical Relations Directorbrodbeck@uci.edu, (949) 824-2260

I S R S T U D E N TN E W S B R I E F S

Rohit Khare (R. Taylor, advisor)received his Ph.D. in December 2003.

His dissertation istitled “Extendingthe REpresenta-tional StateTransfer (REST)Architectural Stylefor DecentralizedSystems”. Readabout Khare’sresearch in ISRTechnical ReportUCI-ISR-03-8.Khare is now aconsultant at 4K

Associates, http://www.4k-associates.com/, and was a founder ofKnowNow, http://www.knownow.com/

Mark Bergman (G. Mark, advisor)received his Ph.D. in August 2003.His dissertation is titled“Understanding Ecologies of LargeScale System Requirements using theAuthority-Activity Model: In SituRequirements Analysis of the NewMillenium Program.” Bergman is cur-rently an ISR Post-DoctoralResearcher.http://www.isr.uci.edu/~mbergman

Sameer Patil (A. Kobsa, advisor)worked with a team of researchers atIBM T.J. Watson Research Center dur-ing his summer internship. Heexplored improving the user experi-ence for performing search on IBM’scorporate Web site (http://www.ibm.com/).

John Georgas (R. Taylor, advisor)spent his summer at The AerospaceCorp. on a project introducing Gridservices to a satellite analysis tool.Offloading heavy-duty computationto a large cluster will hopefullyincrease performance, and allow morecomplex analyses to be deliveredsooner.

Scott Hendrickson, Eric Dashofy andRichard Taylor’s (advisor) paper “AnApproach for Tracing andUnderstanding AsynchronousArchitectures” was accepted as a shortpaper to the 18th IEEE Int’l Conf. onAutomated Software Engineering(ASE 2003) held in October.

For information on graduate studentinternships, contact Dr. Susan J.Knight, sknight@uci.edu, (949) 824-5927.

Khare

I S R A L U M N I N E W S B R I E F S

David Hilbert, Ph.D. 1999, (D. Redmiles,advisor), has been promoted to SeniorScientist at FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc.(FXPAL).

Hadar Ziv, Ph.D. 1997, (D. Richardson, advi-sor), was a School of ICS Award Honoreein the 2003 10th Annual Celebration ofTeaching. Ziv is a Lecturer in SICS and aSenior Software Engineer at eBuilt, Inc.

2003 ISR Research Forum:When Research Met the RealWorld

The Institute’s biggest annual event, held thisyear at UCI on June 17, 2003, featured IBMResearch’s Alfred Spector, VP Services andSoftware, showcased ISR’s newer facultyresearch, and emphasized real world issues.Registrants lauded the quality of the researchrepresented, as exemplified by commentsfrom Jim Swanek of The AerospaceCorporation. “I enjoyed the ISR ResearchForum. The technical quality of the researchand mastery of subject matter by theresearchers with whom I spoke was excellent.I particularly impressed with the quality ofthe students I had the opportunity to meet atthe poster and demonstration sessions. Ilook forward to future ISR events.”

“An excellent mix of talks—very worth-while,” said another industry attendee. Theprogram mix included:

■ A mixed academic-industry panel addressingthe controversial applications question, IsSOAP really the magic bullet to overcomeCORBA’s limitations for distributed applica-tion development?

■ Complementary talks by an ISR-AerospaceCorporation aspect-oriented collaborationteam;

■ A talk about how alternative scenarios caninform software specifications;

■ A talk on extrapolating and using people’scomputer- and real-life-evidenced relation-ship patterns to reconfigure computer tools;and

■ The keynote speaker on creating new com-puter application domains by optimizingcomputer-supported functions.

As expected, the panel, entitled, “WebServices vs Distributed Objects: Architecturesfor Decentralized Applications,” generatedsome heat about the SOAP—CORBA con-troversy from both the audience and pan-elists. Three basic issues were addressed bypanelists Rohit Khare (advisor RichardTaylor), Microsoft’s Henrik Frystyk Nielsenand Alodar Systems’ Mark Thomsen: appro-priateness of alternative programming mod-els, semantic issues, and service quality.There was some consensus: both protocolshave the same goals and very different engi-neering approaches. Lively audience feed-back included ISR Director Richard Taylor'scomment that although SOAP can be used toexpose and cope with transient network fail-ures better than CORBA can, neitherapproach fully lives up to their touted bene-fits — particularly CORBA's claim of provid-ing transparency. Keynote speaker AlfredSpector weighed in from the audience on thetrade-off between performance and extensi-bility, pointing out that extensibility is farmore important than performance in webservices. At the end of the day there mayhave been few converts, one way or another,but a better understanding of the ideal solu-tion was gained by all.

There was ample evidence that the Forumachieved its goal of bringing academia andindustry together for mutually beneficialexchanges. A full third of registrants were

from industry. One industry attendee said,“Interaction between the University andindustry is a good idea—keep up the initia-tive.” John VanZandt of the internationalsoftware development firm CEOConsultancy went further to explain the ben-efits of academia-industry interactions. Heappreciated the opportunity to see that aca-demic research is actually being tested in realworld applications, as well exemplified byISR. He planned to pass on insights gainedto his clients.

The surprise hit of the event was the presen-tation by graduate student Danyel Fisher (P.Dourish, advisor). Described by one indus-try attendee as “eloquent!”, Fisher showedhow social networks can be traced andtracked in computer systems. He advocatesusing this information to better advantage,elevating social relationship information toits rightful place in importance—and asreadily accessible—in computer systems asdocuments and databases. For more infor-mation on Danyel Fisher, see article on p. 2.

For more detailed information about the2003 Forum, including presentation slidesand poster abstracts, please go tohttp://www.isr.uci.edu/events/Research-Forum-2003/.

If you missed this stimulating and produc-tive exchange of cutting-edge ideas and busi-ness solutions, be sure you don’t miss nextyear’s Forum, which will build on this year’ssuccesses. The next ISR Research Forum willbe held in June 2004 at UCI. Look for moreinformation online and in the next issue ofthe ISR Connector.

To receive the ISR Connector, send an email requestto: isr@uci.edu

ISR news, including the Connector, is available at theISR Web site: http://www.isr.uci.edu

For more information, contact:

Dr. Susan J. KnightCorporate Relations Officer

sknight@uci.edu, (949) 824-5927 or

Debra A. BrodbeckTechnical Relations Director

brodbeck@uci.edu, (949) 824-2260

6 http://www.isr.uc i .edu

S P E C I A L T H A N K SThe UCI Institute for Software Research

is generously supported by:

The Aerospace CorporationThe Boeing Company

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Panelists Frystyk Nielsen, Khare, and Thomsen

Speaker Phil Schmidt, The Aerospace Corp.

Nebula photo courtesy of the NASA National Space Science Data Center.