 | |  | | Dorée Duncan Seligmann
Director, Collaborative Applications Research
"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?" |
| My Research | My interest is to develop new systems that enable people to communicate more effectively and efficiently. Under the broad rubric of providing a rich user interface, this work involves issues ranging from aesthetic considerations to mechanisms to increase ease-of-use and a user's control over devices and systems to unburden them from a barrage of choices and information. My work spans a number of disciplines: art, anthropology, computer graphics, intelligent user interface, multimedia, and theatre. All relate to human communication, and each informs the others. Fashioning myself as a bricoleur, we build real end-to-end systems, taking existing technologies as well as the promise of emerging technologies, using them and altering them to enable new capabilities that ultimately fulfill user needs. Specific topics of inquiry include the communication-enablement of business processes, context-aware applications, presence-based technologies, social networks, mobile communication solutions, communications middleware, and intelligent user-interfaces. I did not come to this directly. I studied anthropology at Harvard University, and wrote a thesis that compared Irish and Irish-American pubs. Afterwards, I moved to Paris and spent several years directing and designing theatrical productions and started an English-language theatre. Upon returning to the United States, I earned a PhD in Computer Science at Columbia University; my dissertation describes a system to automatically generate 3D graphics based on communicative intent. At Bell Laboratories, I was a designer of Rapport, an early multimedia conferencing system, N-ICE (Networked-Interactive Collaborative Environment) that enables users to share arbitrary application programs in persistent environments and then Archways (a pleasant mixture of my dissertation work with my work in multimedia systems). Archways automatically generates a 3D virtual environment (3D graphics and 3D sound) for multimedia communication using knowledge-based graphics and intelligent objects. Having missed the glory years of E.A.T. I started several collaborations with artists and artistic institutions. I headed the Metaphorium web-site that featured experiments in visual metaphors and narratives, including “The Message is The Medium,” SubwaySurface, MessageInABottle, SandTypewriter/SkyWriter, LiveWebStationary, and the IsleOfWrite. I used a PDA as a IP phone device, worked on the first softswitch, and a series of systems to help remote work groups collaborate better. |
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| Projects | The endpoint is going to change to be any combination of devices, calls and interactions will move seamlessly across devices, networks, media, and modalities. Communications will become applications, but communications decisions will be determined at runtime by platforms just as computing resources are selected at runtime. And all of this will have to be based on a wealth of information –that is incomplete, unreliable, or just plain wrong. And everything we consider familiar – from a telephone dialtone to changing a TV channel--will change completely. New systems will provide a ubiquitous user experience seamlessly over networks, dynamic sets of devices, media, and modalities: otherwise independent and closed communication channels will be transformed into virtual pipes, and always-on always-accessible agents will manage how competing applications and user-interactions are rendered on these pipes. This reasoning layer is the foundation for intelligent communications and those agents are what “the phone of the future” will be. With this in mind, my group’s projects range from activity tracking on a cellphone, to utilizing models for social networks to select an expert to bridge into a call, a complete mobile communication system that we trialed in a working hospital unit, or a authoring and execution environment for communication-enabled business processes. |
| Publications | I have published dozens of papers, presented interactive installations, in peer-reviewed conferences and journals, in areas including, HCI, multimedia, collaborative work, intelligent user-interfaces, augmented reality, web-based communications, and computer graphics. In 1999, I launched a column for IEEE Multimedia and was in charge of all editing until 2006. To date, I serve as the Associate Editor in Chief. My book, Life Into Art: Isadora Duncan and Her World, published by WWNorton, provides a glimpse into my family attic. Since joining Avaya I have filed over 50 patents. |
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