Curriculum Vitae for Saul Greenberg Professor, Computer Science

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Research Overview

I am an active researcher in Human Computer Interaction, a sub-area of Computer Science concerned with methods and principles on how to design computer interfaces so that people can interact effectively with them. I specialize in computer supported cooperative work, where I investigate how people work together, how the computer and related technologies (groupware) affect group behaviour, and how software can be designed to support and augment group work. I also work in information visualization and manipulation techniques for large data spaces, which allows both individuals and groups to understand and manipulate their large information spaces.

Along with my team of students and research assistants, I am actively involved in the following general research projects.

Groupware Toolkits.

We are developing and continually refining a groupware toolkit called GroupKit, concentrating on architectural issues, programming abstractions, and system flexibility. We also maintain GroupKit as a relatively robust engine that can be used by our group and other CSCW researchers to rapidly prototype groupware applications and widgets.

 

Groupware Interfaces

We are investigating groupware interfaces. This includes both theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of generic group needs, and implementation of actual interface components, metaphors, and strategies that can support these needs. Example sub-projects include:

• Interfaces for workspace awareness. We are creating software that supports information for group awareness, which provides a person with the up-to-the-minute knowledge of what other group members are doing.
• Interfaces for session management. We are pursuing flexible architectures to support a wide variety of session managers for groupware, which provide the means for people to enter into one or more groupware sessions. A variety of metaphors are being investigated, with emphasis on the way spatial metaphors can be applied to groupware.

• Reactive Environments. We are investigating how offices can be instrumented with sensors and devices that can augment people's ability to communicate with distant team members. The main idea is to afford people awareness of other's availability for communication, leading to light-weight casual interaction and work.

• Handheld CSCW and Single Display Groupware. We are creating systems that help us see how people move from personal work performed on their PDAs and computers to group work on large displays in a meeting room.

   

Information visualization, manipulation and navigation.

We investigated several approaches to visualizing large amounts information, and for allowing people to manipulate that information. For example, we studied how information visualization techniques, such as fisheye views and transparent interfaces, can be used within groupware applications to give people a sense of awareness of what others are doing. In another project, we analyzed how people navigate through their previously visited pages on the world wide web.