Summer internships at IBM Research

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IBM are beginning our summer 2009 intern recruiting season. Our
project hopes to invite two interns, one with qualitative skills and
one with quantitative and programming skills.

Our project looks broadly at the “health” of social software
applications in enterprises, including applications such as social-
bookmarking, social-networking, blogging, online communities, etc. It
is our usual research setting – large databases and logs of user-
authenticated actions and (in most cases) views, access to most of the
users for surveys or interviews, potential with many users for
“observation” via screen-shares. Our plan is to determine which data
are crucial, to develop a generalized methodology for collecting or
capturing those data, creating some very solid metrics based on those
data, and making those metrics usable (“consumable”) by enterprise
managers and employees. To do this, we will need to do good
qualitative work to understand what people need to know about their
social data (and how they will use that knowledge), leading to new
understandings and descriptions of emergent phenomena (think of Jenn
Thom-Santelli’s CHI 2008 paper on tagging for audiences ). And of
course those insights will guide us to the right data to capture, and
the right capture methodologies, as well as powerful analytics and
metrics, well-grounded in people’s needs and (with luck) in theory as
well.

IBM go to great lengths to provide excellent experiences for our
interns. Our organization in Cambridge generally hosts 8-12 interns
each summer, and we focus on both their individual success stories and
their shared well-being as a kind of “class of 2009.” With most
interns, our goal is an archival research contribution at a first-rank
conference, with the intern as first author and presenter (see recent
CHI and CSCW papers by Rosta Farzan, Shilad Sen, and Jennifer Thom-
Santelli). Usually, each intern has a primary mentor and one or more
secondary mentors. In our particular project, each intern will have
two primary research mentors — Joan DiMicco and me — and one primary
technical mentor — Beth Brownholtz. We will also be able to ask
Casey Dugan and Werner Geyer for secondary technical mentoring, if
needed. Other disciplines within our local organization include
visualization, collaborative software development, gaming, and
conceptual design.

Om någon vill veta mer om avdelningen kan ni kontakta mig. Jag gjorde
min postdoc där 1999.

MVH
Olle Bälter
[email protected]