Work-centered digital information services are a set of library-like services meant to address the mission of the work group. Workplace users have specialized needs -- they want to retrieve information, rather than documents per se; they need to be able to integrate existing, and continually created, internal bodies of multi-datatype documents, with external sources; and they require that digital information systems be integrated into, as well as augment, established work practices.
Our work touches on a number of these items: User needs assessment, document image analysis, natural language analysis, and computer vision. A central theme of our work is a new model of documents, called "multivalent documents", which begins to exploit some of the possibilities of the underlying digital medium.
Robert Wilensky received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1978. Since that time, he has been on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he is now Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Division.