Using the browser as a platform, IBM is exploring a new wave of smarter Web applications to address the most pressing societal and business issues. IBM researchers have combined different Web components – data mashups, live video, audio, graphics – all on the same browser page, allowing multiple users to “huddle” online, interact with these components in real-time and see each others’ changes over a standard Internet connection. For example, imagine a virtual room where teams of medical experts can simultaneously discuss, review and whiteboard medical test data. Massive Mashup, a new technology designed to complement BlueSpruce’s capabilities, searches and organizes unstructured data to more clearly visualize hidden connections and relationships.
With the amount of time most of us spend online, we could all benefit from shared knowledge about how we get things done there. For example, people want to show their parents how to upload photos, biologists want to show colleagues how to analyze data and employees need to know how to order business cards. IBM Research’s CoScripter system employs techniques from programming by demonstration to make it easy for people to capture, share and automate scripts for completing web-based tasks. A unique new feature lets people continuously record their web actions in the background and selectively publish them. People can also share them with their social networks on sites like Facebook or publish scripts on their blog. CoScripter is available as a FireFox plug-in athttp://coscripter.research.ibm.com.
The mobile web is changing how we use the Internet and what kind of content we want or need to access online. Highlight gives people the ability to create mobile applications from existing web sites and deploy these personalized applications to mobile devices. Currently, most websites aren’t optimized for mobile devices and this technology makes it easier to navigate web sites on small screens without clutter or content that you just don’t need on-the-go.
Play-by-Play is a general-purpose tool for the Web that uses instant messaging to support collaborative browsing tasks such as customer support and search. The technology is especially handy in on-the-go scenarios when a mobile user needs help from someone sitting at a computer.
SaND combines social discovery and social networking into one platform, highlighting relationships between people by searching and analyzing a wealth of information and tags found in a variety of data sources from papers to patents and blog posts to social applications, Lotus Connections and more. This research technology does more than suggest that you should connect to someone; it has the ability to show underlying relationships and provide levels of context to how you may be connected to someone. You can also build applications such as unified search, recommendation and personalization systems, expertise locators, and more with this framework.
Privacy-aware MarketPlace is designed to provide total control over privacy settings on social networking sites. Based on privacy models and algorithms, this software takes advantage of the social graphs used by Facebook, Orkut, OpenSocial and other social networks to construct stronger privacy protection. This application lets users calculate their "Privacy Score," much like a credit score, and recommends privacy settings. We’ll show how you could resell a gift received from friends in your social network without embarrassing them or to search for a job without letting your current employer know about it of coworkers are in his network. Try PaMP at http://apps.facebook.com/p_a_m_p/.