The Computing Innovation Fellows Project

Posted on: Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
Broad Research Area: Databases / Information Retrieval / Data Mining, Graphics / Visualization, HCI / CSCW, Mobile / Ubiquitous / Embedded Computing

Research Interests:

I lead the Mobile Computing research group at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. We focus on three different themes:
- Understanding how users employ the latest generation of smartphones in order to understand how to build effective mobile user experiences and to identify opportunities to improve existing or create new mobile applications and services.
- Creating new mobile collaboration applications and services. For example, based on our studies of how users employ smartphones we identified an opportunity to improve mobile email clients to better support how users actually use email while mobile: identifying what’s new, identifying what’s important enough to handle immediately, deleting messages that aren’t needed, and deferring the handling of all other messages until users reach a desktop or laptop. See http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/projects/mobileemail/ for further details on that project.
- Exploring how mobile phones can act as sensors to capture information as well as windows to access it. We are particularly interested in how many users can contribute information to a central service that can aggregate and analyze that information to provide increased value to a broader community.

In addition to these core areas, my team also explores the creation of new interaction techniques (such as ShapeWriter – http://www.almaden.ibm.com/u/zhai/shapewriter_research.htm) and of underlying theories and models for how mobile users interact.

Contact Information:

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at jspierce at us.ibm.com.