Large pharmaceutical companies have a wealth of reaction and chemical structure data, but face a new problem: analyzing that corpus to yield project insights and future directions. One straight-forward approach would be to have a recommendation system to match drug structures with similar research endeavors across geographically- or organizationally-separated groups. We developed and deployed Chem Recommender, a system that suggests similar, related work to experiments that chemists have recently started. The goal of the system is to accelerate the drug discovery process by ensuring that chemists are aware of each other's work. To date, we have sent more than 8500 recommendations to over 800 medicinal chemists in our organization. The results have been positive, with several chemists reporting that the recommendations have aided their molecular syntheses.

While there are tools that allow distributed teams to collaboratively edit in real time, little work examines this practice among real teams doing real work. Even less is known about how teams from different countries make use of real-time collaborative editing tools. The current work highlights results from a qualitative user study of real-world Japanese and U.S. distributed work teams who used LiveDeck, a real-time slide editing and whiteboarding tool. Through the implementation of various novel features used as probes, differences in behavior and attitudes between team members were uncovered. Differences in the use of slide navigation options, anonymity features, and pop-up 'emotes' representing nonverbal gestures are discussed.

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.

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.

Electronic mail has become the most widely-used application for business productivity and communication, yet many people are frustrated with their email. Though email usage has changed, our email clients largely have not. In this paper, we describe a prototype email client developed out of a multi-year iterative design process aimed at providing those who "live in their email" with an improved, integrated email experience. We highlight innovative features and describe the user trials for each version of the prototype with resulting modifications. Finally, we discuss how these studies have recast our understanding of the email "habitat" and user needs.

This paper presents a survey of the Visual Information Environment Prototype (VIEP), a system which demonstrates the next generation of Command, Control, Communication,and Intelligence (C31) systems.In particular, VIEP provides a novel integration of user interaction techniques including wireless input and largescreen output to facilitate the task of collaborating with media such as large images, audio, and video.The prototype has been implemented and demonstrated over both local and wide area networks.

We describe a scalable CSCW infrastructure designed to handle heavy-weight data sets, such as extremely large images and video. Scalability is achieved through exclusive use of reliable and unreliable multicast protocols. The infrastructure uses a replicated architecture rather than a centralized architecture, both to reduce latency and to improve responsiveness. Use of 1) reliable (multicast) transport of absolute, rather than relative, information sets, 2) time stamps, and 3) a last-in-wins policy provide coherency often lacking in replicated architectures. The infrastructure allows users to toggle between WYSIWIS and non-WYSIWIS modes. That, coupled with effective use of multicast groups, allows greatly improved responsiveness and performance for managing heavy-weight data.

When people have meetings or discussions, frequently they use conversational props : physical models, drawings, or other concrete representations of information used to enhance the exchange of information. If the participants are geographically separated, it is difficult to make effective use of props since each physical prop can only exist in one place. Computer applications that allow two or more users to simultaneously view and manipulate the same data can be used to augment human-to-human telecommunication. We have built the Rendezvous system is similar to many UIMSs or user interface toolkits in that it is intended to simplify the construction of graphical direct-manipulation interfaces. It goes beyond these systems by adding functionality to support the construction of multiuser applications. Based on experience with several large applications built with the Rendezvous system, we believe that it is useful for building conversational props and other computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) applications. We present a list of required features of conversational props, some example applications built with the Rendezvous system, and a description of the Rendezvous system.

Rendezvous is an architecture for creating synchronous multi-user applications. It consists of two parts: a run-time architecture for managing the multi-user session and a start-up architecture for managing the network connectivity. The run-time architecture is based on a User Interface Management System called MEL, which is a language extension to Common Lisp providing support for graphics operations, object-oriented programming, and constraints. Constraints are used to manage three dimensions of sharing: sharing of underlying information, sharing of views, and sharing of access. The start-up architecture decouples invoking and joining an application so that not all users need be known when the application is started. At present, the run-time architecture is completed and running test applications. As a first test of the complete Rendezvous architecture, we will implement a multi-user card game by the end of the summer.

A passive information grazing system (PIGS) is presented which is a prototype information delivery and filtering system for casual users. In PIGS, information articles in multimedia form are electronically transmitted to users over a prototype broadband network. To assist users in managing the potential flood of articles, PIGS selects information for individual users based on their personalized interest profiles. As users' interests change over time, their profiles could be automatically adapted using implicit and explicit feedback about each article. An examination is made of PIGS, with particular emphasis on transmission and call processing capacity requirements.>