I am a member of the Research Staff in the Computer Science Laboratory at the Palo Alto Research Center. I joined PARC after completing my Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley.
My research focuses on software and technologies that support and enhance social interactions. I observe interactions in online environments; I build tools to analyze these interactions further; and I design, deploy and evaluate new social technologies to help people communicate and collaborate with each other.
I use a broad combination of methods in my research: "virtual" ethnography (participant observation and in-depth interviews in online spaces), data mining and statistical analysis, and information visualization. My publications have appeared in areas including Human-Computer Interaction, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and sociology.
I am currently working on the following project:
PlayOn - The Social Dimensions of Multiplayer Online Games
Online gaming is emerging as an interesting new form of social experience: many of today’s games offer environments populated with thousands of simultaneous players connected via the Internet. As such, the social dimensions of massively multi-player online games (MMOGs) raise a wide range of interesting sociological questions.
I have been exploring how online gaming communities function in practice based on a combination of qualitative observations, automated data collection using "bots", and statistical analysis. To complement these I have also been developing my own analytical tools such as the Social Dashboard. Our results are published regularly at the PlayOn blog, and I also write comments on the social life of virtual worlds at Terra Nova.
Some past projects include:
Studies of Open Source Software development
For my dissertation work at Berkeley (under the supervision of Prof. Warren Sack and Prof. Peter Lyman), I used a combination of ethnography and custom-built analytical software (the OSS Browser) to observe communication in Open Source projects. In particular, I examined how participants come to join, participate and evolve within these new organizations.
Email and Task Management
Email is used so much by office workers it has become their main habitat. Based on extensive observations of email users' practices, our research team proposed a fundamental reconception of email: from messaging system to task management environment. The project's page summarizes our initial ethnographic work and describes the subsequent system we designed, Taskmaster.
Outside of Work
I can often be found sailing with my wife somewhere around the Bay on our Wauquiez Gladiateur. Our previous boat was a 1961 Pearson Triton, "Prise Au Vent", that we extensively restored by ourselves.
