StudioBRIDGE is an awareness system, based on instant messaging (IM), developed for students working in open studio spaces in the Architecture Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The goal of StudioBRIDGE is to help students initiate online and offline interactions by giving them an awareness of nearby people, groups, locations, and events of the community. Even when students are working in close proximity to each other, they are often not aware of the activities and expertise of their colleagues nearby. We believe that this integrated awareness could lead to increased peer learning and expertise sharing by encouraging informal social communication, particularly in groups whose members have existing social and physical ties. In this paper, we describe the user community and the motivation, design, and initial pilot deployment of StudioBRIDGE.
We present an automatic people-centered organization of the email message store, where all the information is organized by the association with the message sender or recipients. By using a zoomable list control, we can show most frequent contacts on the top level, and still scale to a large number of contacts overall. Messages exchanged with a person or any ad-hoc defined group are displayed as a continuous conversation. Individual nuggets sent in email, such as attachments and links, are extracted from messages and put into their own window. Organizing nuggets into people-oriented shared spaces supports email-based collaboration. The proposed email client enhancements tested very well in a preliminary user study.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.