Multimedia Research at Microsoft: Making Audio and Video First-Class Objects
March 2, 2001
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.