XR devices running chat-bots powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have the to become always-on agents that enable much better productivity scenarios. Current screen based chat-bots do not take advantage of the the full-suite of natural inputs available in XR, including inward facing sensor data, instead they over-rely on explicit voice or text prompts, sometimes paired with multi-modal data dropped as part of the query. We propose a solution that leverages an attention framework that derives context implicitly from user actions, eye-gaze, and contextual memory within the XR environment. Our work minimizes the need for engineered explicit prompts, fostering grounded and intuitive interactions that glean user insights for the chat-bot.

We describe a first experiment in enterprise crowdfunding - i.e., employees allocating money for employee-initiated proposals at an Intranet site, including a trial of this system with 511 employees in IBM Research. Major outcomes include: employee proposals that addressed diverse individual and organizational needs; high participation rates; extensive inter-departmental collaboration, including the discovery of large numbers of previously unknown collaborators; and the development of goals and motivations based on collective concerns at multiple levels of project groups, communities of practice, and the organization as a whole. We recommend further, comparative research into crowd-funding and other forms of employee-initiated innovations.

In this paper, we propose to improve time management in the enterprise by providing users interactive visualizations of how they are spending their time. Through an interview study (n=21) in a multi-national corporation, we were able to determine the data available for visualizations and the value of a number of general visualizations of employees' calendar data. We develop implications for design in improving personal time management.

The difficulties remote participants of distributed meetings face are widely recognized. In this paper we describe the design of an avatar-based e-meeting support tool named Olympus, which aims to ameliorate some of the challenges remote participants face in distributed meetings. Olympus provides a customizable peripheral display on the bottom of existing e-meeting solutions. An initial observational study was conducted of the use of Olympus in 6 meetings, three each of a status meeting and a presentation meeting. By illustrating how avatars were used in the two meeting types, we hope to surface design issues and refine our understanding of how avatars may be useful in the design of online meeting spaces.

Developers frequently add annotations to source code to help them remember pertinent information and mark locations of interest for future investigation. Finding and refinding these notes is a form of navigation that is integral to software maintenance. Although there is some tool support in modern development environments for authoring and navigating these comments, we have observed that these annotations often fail to remind and are sometimes difficult to find by the programmer. To address these shortcomings, we have designed a new approach for software navigation called tags for software engineering activities (TagSEA). TagSEA combines the notion of waypointing (a mechanism for marking locations in spatial navigation) with social tagging to support programmers in defining semantically rich annotations to source code comments. The tool provides support for creating, editing, navigating, and managing these annotations. We present the results from two empirical studies, where we observed and then analyzed how professional programmers used source code annotations to support their development activities over 24 months. Our findings indicate that the addition of semantic information to annotations can improve their value. We also provide suggestions on how annotation tools in general may be improved.

A common form of live technical presentation is that given by programmers for a programming audience during conferences, demonstrations, code reviews, and tutorials. Such presentations require manual switching between general presentation software and the integrated development environment (IDE), as well as reconfiguration of the IDE's UI to be readable by an audience. In this paper, we present a novel system that allows programmers to easily combine traditional slideware with seamless transitions to user-specified regions of the IDE along with special effects for live demonstration.

We have developed a new approach for software navigation called TagSEA (Tagging of Software Engineering Activities). TagSEA combines the notion of "waypointing" with "social tagging" to support programmers in defining navigational structures over a software system. In this paper we present the results from a case study series, conducted with professional programmers, that demonstrates how this tool supports navigation and under what circumstances. We conclude with insights into user-definable navigational structures, and how they can support software maintenance more effectively.

This paper presents the conceptual design of TagSEA, a collaborative tool to support asynchronous software development. Our goal is to develop a lightweight source code annotation tool that enhances navigation, coordination, and capture of knowledge relevant to a software development team. Our design is inspired by combining "waypoints" from geographical navigation with "social tagging" from social bookmarking software to support coordination and communication among software developers. We describe the motivation behind this work, walk through the design and implementation, and report early feedback on how this lightweight tool supports collaborative software engineering activities. Finally, we suggest a number of new research directions that this topic exposes.

Mission critical applications and legacy systems may be difficult to revise and rebuild, and yet it is sometimes desirable to retrofit their user interfaces with new collaborative features without modifying and recompiling the original code. We describe the use of Aspect-Oriented Programming as a lightweight technique to accomplish this, present an example of incorporating presence awareness deeply into an application's user interface, and discuss the implications of this technique for developing CSCW software.

We present contextual collaboration, an approach to building collaborative systems that embeds collaborative capabilities into core applications, and discuss its advantages. We describe the Jazz collaborative application development environment that we are using to explore this concept and discuss design guidelines that have emerged from our experience.

Information hiding is one of the most important and influential principles in software engineering. It prescribes that software modules hide implementation details from other modules in order to decrease the dependency between them. This separation also decreases the dependency among software developers implementing modules, thus simplifying some aspects of collaboration. A common instantiation of this principle is in the form of application programming interfaces (APIs). We performed a field study of the use of APIs and observed that they served many roles. We observed that APIs were successful indeed in supporting collaboration by serving as contracts among stakeholders as well as by reifying organizational boundaries. However, the separation that they accomplished also hindered other forms of collaboration, particularly among members of different teams. Therefore, we think argue that API's do not only have beneficial purposes. Based on our results, we discuss implications for collaborative software development tools.

The principle of information hiding has been very influential in software engineering since its inception in 1972. This principle prescribes that software modules hide implementation details from other modules in order to decrease their interdependencies. This separation also decreases the dependency among software developers implementing modules, thus simplifying some aspects of collaboration. A common instantiation of this principle is in the form of application programming interfaces (APIs). We performed a qualitative study on how practitioners use APIs in their daily work. Although particularly interested in aspects of collaboration, we report all findings about their observed use. The findings include mundane observations that are predicted by theory, ways that APIs support collaborative software development. But the findings also include some surprises, ways that APIs hinder collaboration. The surprises indicate directions for further improvement of collaborative software development practices and tools.

We describe a new collaborative technology that is mid-way between the informality of email and the formality of shared workspaces. Email and other ad hoc collaboration systems are typically lightweight and flexible, but build up an unmanageable clutter of copied objects. At the other extreme, shared workspaces provide formal, structured collaboration, but are too heavyweight for users to set up. To bridge this gap between the ad hoc and formal, this paper introduces the notion of "object-centric sharing", where users collaborate in a lightweight manner but aggregate and organize different types of shared artifacts into semi-structured activities with dynamic membership, hierarchical object relationships, as well as real-time and asynchronous collaboration. We present a working prototype implemented with a replicated peer-to-peer architecture, which we describe in detail, and demonstrate its performance in synchronous and asynchronous modes.

Virtual environments are often unsuitable for delicate operations because of the poverty of feedback, particularly tactile and force feedback.However, force feedback done properly requires large, heavy, expensive equipment.We have experimented with a particular form of tactile feedback using vibration as a substitute for force feedback.Substituting vibration for force feedback is intuitively appealing because it is cheap and low cost.But is it effective?Unfortunately, the answer is both "yes" and "no".We describe an experiment evahtating the effect of vibrotactile sensory substitution on user performance during a grasping task with delicate virtual objects.We found that adding vibrotactile feedback to visual and audio feedback improved task completion time for novice users, but led to increased grasp pressure over repeated uses of the system.