Alan Wexelblat
Contact Info:
awexelblat@gmail.com
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Current Status
I have a new site with examples of
my work published off Dreamhost. The content of this site is
outdated, but it still shows up as the first hit on searches so I keep it
here.
If you want to reach me, use the email address at the left.
I blog about copyright and intellectual property issues at Copyfight
Old Status
I finished my Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab in January 1999, under the
supervision of Dr. Pattie Maes
in the Software
Agents research group. We work on systems (sometimes called
Community Support Systems or Digital Ecologies) to help
people achieve working partnerships among themselves and with machines.
The basic notion is that you have a group of people, probably dispersed in
space and time, who need assistance with an information-related task
(search, browsing, navigation, retrieval, recommendation) and they turn
over part of this task to computer systems that help them by finding,
organizing, and recommending knowledge sources, including other people.
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My doctoral research centered around the notion of using history
information to help people solve present problems. I call this
interaction history because it is the record of the interactions of
people and objects. I applied this idea to navigation, because I am
interested in how people interact with large information spaces, such as
the Web. I believe that browsing is different from search and requires
different tools to help in the task. In particular, tools which show the
work of other people browsing the same information space can be helpful;
such tools can help users get things done and they can help designers
create spaces which are easier and more fruitful to navigate.
I have placed online two new papers about
Footprints, the system built to show these ideas. One appeared at the
IEEE's 32nd Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences
(HICSS'99). It is available in HTML
form or as a Postscript
file.
The second paper covers version 3 of the system and some results of
user testing the software, and was presented at CHI'99 in
Pittsburgh. This one is also available in HTML form or as a
Postscript file.
The Web site for Footprints is no longer up. Sorry, but the data used
in the system were taken from people who were helping my research and when
the dissertation was finished I needed to get rid of the data. Software
is available for Lab sponsors and possibly for academic researchers.
Email me for details.
An older paper describing the second
version of the system is available. This paper also describes key
components of my theories about interaction history information.
You can also read my first paper
on Footprints.
If you are interested in other work I have done, you can read guidelines for agent interfaces and
a report on an experiment with an
anthropomorphic interface. The former paper will be published at some
point in ACM interactions and the latter paper was published
in a AAAI Tech Report.
Past Work
I've worked in a number of other areas prior to this. Some of my old
work can be found here:
Complete Publications List
A complete publications history can be found in my
publications list.
Data Bits
The Author in his Native Habitat
The Author, his posse, and his
boss, and another angle on us.
MIT Media Lab home page.
MIT home page.
Copyright © 1995-2010 Alan Wexelblat
Alan
Wexelblat <awexelblat@gmail.com>
Last modified: Thu Nov 4 08:04:39 2010
