CLARITY Researchers On The Move
An important part of the CLARITY work programme is interaction with industry, which is most effective when industry researchers are embedded in CLARITY labs, or CLARITY researchers visit industry labs. Dr. Jill Freyne, a postdoctoral researcher working with Barry Smyth on RP6 Personalization in Context is currently midway through a one year on site visit with the Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Group, in the Cambridge office of the T.J. Watson Research Center at IBM Research. Jill has been working with researchers at CUE on the evaluation and enhancement of multiple social software applications, including social tagging and social networking, aimed at facilitating and improving collaboration within the enterprise domain. Jill has presented her work with the Clarity Research Center to both the Cambridge and Hawthorn offices of IBM Research and in the Autumn will be speaking at the MIT CSAIL HCI Seminar Series.
Meanwhile, Dr. Colum Foley who works with Alan Smeaton on RP5 Content Organisation and Management, has started work with FX Palo Alto Laboratory (FXPAL) in Northern California. FXPAL is a leading multimedia research laboratory which focuses on distributed collaboration technologies, among other things. Colum has already co-organised a workshop with FXPAL researchers at the JCDL conference earlier this year and his work on collocated collaborative search has much overlap with the ongoing work at FXPAL. Over the next 2 months he will work jointly with FXPAL researchers to implement a web version of his collaborative search techniques. Colum has worked with FXPAL researchers on the development, testing and analysis of a novel co-located collaborative search system, which will be evaluated at this year's TRECVid video benchmarking activity. He has also been invited to give a talk on his work at the company's internal seminar series.
Finally, Jer Hayes has been appointed as the Clarity Research & Commercialisation Relationship Manager with IBM.
Jer will work as an embedded researcher within CLARITY for the IBM Centre of Excellence for Water Management at the IBM campus in Dublin. The recently established centre of excelllence will harness innovative research and services in monitoring, quality control, and management of fresh water, marine and oceanic environments. This collaboration between IBM and CLARITY will allow for advanced environmental stewardship, especially in the marine environment.