Our central question is: How will and how should the way people communicate change because of advances in software, hardware, and wireless technologies? For each project we ask the following four questions – and require good answers: How does this change the user experience? How does this change the developers’ experience? What does this change about the infrastructure, platforms, and technology – what new capabilities are needed? What does this mean for IT?
When we formed this department, we began by looking at simple paradigm shifts. If systems were being built to provide communications to anyone, anywhere, anytime, anyhow, we asked what it would take to go the next step and build systems that connect the right people, at the right time, in the right place, in the right ways. This led us to build context-aware, presence-aware, location-aware applications; systems to manage presence and location; communication application servers, and solutions for different flavors of mobility.
Then we asked what it would take to go the next step and build platforms that would determine the who, what, where, when, and how of communications in the context of an entire virtual enterprise, where each communication decision is based on the others, in order to support the full range of applications: personal communication management, collaboration, supply chain and management, customer relations, emergency response, and more. | initiative leader
Dorée Duncan Seligmann In this new world of IP, nothing need be more than a click away. But what, we ask, is going to make these endless possibilities and combinations of devices, modalities, media, and networks comprehensible and usable? How will we change the user experience without leaving the users behind? | | | PROJECTS | |  | Hermes
Hermes is a communications-enablement platform that automates complex communications and enables the integration of communication applications with business processes. It models communication applications as workflows over communication tasks that initiate sessions for voice and IM conferencing, alerts and whispers. The communication tasks reason about parameters such as presence, availability, interruptibility and user rules to connect the right people, at the right time, through the right communication media, with the right communication content and context. | | | | | | | SOCIAL
SOCIAL is a project that analyzes interactions among people to build social networks. The social networks use a model that characterizes both individual and group communication patterns in an enterprise. The interactions may occur over a variety of media such as email and voice. | | | | | | | MACCS (Mobile Access for Converged Communications)
MACCS (Mobile Access for Converged Communications) uses mobile technologies and context-aware computing to address the communications and collaboration needs of workers whose job tasks, which are not done at desks or in meeting rooms, require them to be mobile within the enterprise. Our goal was to see if we could address the needs of these workers using only a wireless headset as the endpoint device and an intelligent voice agent as the user interface. | | | | | | | Hybrid Invisible Peer-to-Peer (HiP2P) Enterprise Mobile Communications
Enterprise Mobile Communications enables distributed enterprise mobile workers to form hybrid peer-to-peer networks over long-range and short-range wireless connections at the application layer based on logical proximity. | | | | | | | GhostReporter and Presence-Enabled Mobile Service (PEMS) Platform
GhostReporter is a presence agent residing on Smartphone or other mobile devices to automatically capture and report user presence and communication status independent of network operators. | | | | | | | Mobile Information Gateway (MiGate)
Mobile Information Gateway (MiGate) is an enterprise mobile gateway that enables secure access from mobile devices to information and services located in enterprise domain behind firewalls. | | | | | | | Wireless Multimedia Technology Integration Platform (WMTIP)
Wireless Multimedia Technology Integration Platform (WMTIP) allows the delivery of rich and active multimedia content to mobile users with enhanced security and improved user experience. | | | | | | | Presence and Availability
In this project a user's location (in a car, at work, at home) is used to determine who is permitted to see the user's presence state and communicate with the user. The user track's his/her location using hand-held RFID SIP SIMPLE presence filtering rules are used to determine which watchers are permitted to receive his/her presence state information based on the user's "sphere", e.g. location. | | | | | | | Argus: Agent Technology for Intelligent Communications Applications
Communications applications rely on detailed knowledge of people's communications contexts to make intelligent decisions about who to contact, who should communicate with whom, when, where, and how. Argus is a collection of agents, deployed at user communication endpoints, that collect dynamic user communications contexts and propagate the data to communications applications. Argus agents gather context parameters in a user-transparent fashion whenever possible. For context parameters that are applications-specific and that cannot be determined without user input, Argus agents engage users in multimedia interactions that allow users to explicitly provide values for context parameters. Argus complements communications applications on the user side and helps put intelligence into communications applications. | | | | | | | Rules-Based Availability for Java Applications through JAS
JAS is a sophisticated Java virtual machine add-on that monitors a variety of execution characteristics of Java applications. If an execution time event such as an unhandled exception or an unusually large memory consumption constitutes a problem for the application, JAS can take one of several actions, from reporting the problem to an administrator to restarting the application. By setting up simple rules in a JAS configuration, the application deployer decides which execution time events indicate a problem and how JAS should react to such events. JAS operates in a completely application-transparent fashion and does not require changes to or recompilation of the application code. JAS can add an additional measure of availability to applications that were already designed with high availability in mind but it can also serve as a safety net for applications that contain no availability mechanisms. | | | | | | | J2EE Technologies for Communications Applications and Services
In this project, we evaluate the suitability of J2EE as a platform for delivering intelligent communications applications and services. The appeal of using J2EE for our domain lies in its commoditization of availability, reliability, scalability, data integrity, and security mechanisms. However, because J2EE was developed for a data processing-centric domain, we have to build bridging technology that adapts J2EE to a communications world. In this world, people are resources that become part of the application or service, and people resources are fundamentally different from data resources. Our contributions resulting from this project address both functional and performance shortcomings of the J2EE platform relative to demands in the communications world. |
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