Jonathan Grudin · Microsoft Research
Multimedia Research at Microsoft: Making Audio and Video First-Class Objects

The Collaboration and Multimedia group is focused on making audio and video as versatile as print. Areas of experimentation include low-cost capture of audio and video, multimedia browsing and skimming, tele-presentation, and collaborative annotation of multimedia content. In order to understand the behavioral and social factors that are critical to the success of such technologies, we have conducted numerous experiments with prototype systems.

These include detailed analysis of ongoing use of multimedia within our company, experimental use of our technologies in internal training courses, laboratory studies, and distance education trials conducted jointly with university partners. I will review this work, aspects of which have been published in over a dozen papers in conferences on multimedia, human-computer interaction, computer supported cooperative work, and the world wide web.

Jonathan Grudin is a Senior Researcher in the Collaboration and Multimedia Group at Microsoft Research. He was previously Professor of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine and also taught at Aarhus University, Keio University, and the University of Oslo. Before and after obtaining a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology with Donald Norman at UCSD he worked in research or development in government and industry labs. He is Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction and was Co-chair of the 1998 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work.