 | |  | | Ajita John
Research Scientist
"" |
| Research | My current research focuses on social networking and related technologies. I study collaborative tagging of content especially audio. I also research information flow and communication dynamics in social networks. I recently organized and moderated a panel on the future of online social interactions at the WWW 2008 in Beijing. Panelists were Lada Adamic from Univ. of Michigan, Mark Davis and David Shamma from Yahoo, Ramesh Jain from Univ. of California at Irvine, Frank Nack from Univ. of Netherlands and Doree Seligmann from Avaya Labs. Earlier my interests spanned global user communities on the web and in geographically distributed enterprises who are becoming connected through a proliferation of media and technologies. The increasing scale and diversity in such environments necessitate the reliance on contextual factors to assess suitability for participation in collaborations. I investigated various dimensions of context that influence user collaborations such as social networks, knowledge, expertise, presence, availability, interruptibility, privacy, and awareness. The goal of my research was to automate negotiations in these dimensions to enable effective user collaborations. In the past, I worked at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies in the area of network management. My Ph.D. dissertation from the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin focused on the automatic extraction of parallelism from constraint-based specifications. |
|
| Projects | I am working on a project called Echoes which can be thought of as a Conversation Pensieve (borrowing from J.K.Rowling's device for storing memories) for audio conversations. Users can store, search, browse, and tag audio conversations (of meetings, discussions, presentations etc.). Users are presented with contextualized networks of conversations, users, and tags when they perform searches in Echoes. A recent paper on Echoes was presented at DUX 2007. In the past, I have worked on a project named Hermes which 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 use 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. Hermes was featured (under an earlier name Mercury) in a article on Information Week . I have also worked on projects that explore cohesion in social networks, expertise in collaborative tagging communities, inferring availability from communication activity, collaborative practices and privacy. |
| Publications | I have authored several papers on social networking, network management, networking, communications, and parallel programming. Some important ones are as follows. This year, I have a couple of papers at Hypertext 2008 on communication context and dynamics in social networks. Last year, I co-authored papers on audio tagging at DUX 2007 and an ECSCW 2007 workshop. Work on social cohesion was presented by my summer student Ankur Mani in the invited cluster on social networks at the INFORMS conference. I co-authored a paper on communication flow in social networks at Web Intelligence (WIC 07). In 2006, I co-authored a paper titled " An Activity-based Perspective of Collaborative Tagging" at ICWSM. I presented a paper on inferring expertise from collaborative tagging at the Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop at the World Wide Web Conference 2006. Another paper on Context-Aware Enterprise Communication appeared in The 3rd Workshop on Context Modeling and Reasoning, 2006. In 2005, I co-authored a paper on detection of signatures in network traffic: “ PISA: Automatic Extraction of Traffic Signatures” which appeared in Networking 2005 and was featured on wormblog.com. In 2004, I was the guest editor of a special issue of the Journal of Network and Systems Management on Distributed Management. I am on the technical program committees of NOMS (IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium) and IM (Integrated Management). I am on the Board of Editors for the Journal of Network and Systems Management. |
|
|
|
| |
