We ask how technology can enhance the individual in order to produce organizations that are more creative and efficient, and which better support the individual.

We are developing methods to automatically learn the social network structure within a group based on data collected using unobtrusive, wearable sensors. The questions we are exploring are:

In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now "slideware" computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.

The fundamental challenge for computational media is to contribute to the invention and design of cultures in which humans can express themselves and engage in personally meaningful activities.

Cultures are substantially defined by their media and tools for thinking, working, learning, and collaborating. New media change

(1) the structure and contents of our interests;

(2) the nature of our cognitive and collaborative tools; and,

Building Virtual Communities examines how learning and cognitive change are fostered by online communities. Contributors to this volume explore this question by drawing on their different theoretical backgrounds, methodologies, and personal experience with virtual communities.

Each chapter discusses the different meanings of the terms community, learning, and change. Case studies are included for further clarification. Together, these chapters describe the building out of virtual communities in terms that are relevant to theorists, researchers, and practitioners.

The chapters provide a basis for thinking about the dynamics of Internet community building. This includes consideration of the role of the self or individual as a participant in virtual community, and the design and refinement of technology as the conduit for extending and enhancing the possibilities of community building in cyberspace.

The number of Weblogs now tops a half-million, by most estimates. So it's no surprise that some bloggers, as the writers of these link-filled, diarylike sites are known, are carving some order out of chaos.

It's a pocket-sized computer keyboard. It's highly portable and operated with one hand. It produces all the usual characters with relatively few keys which are pressed in groups, i.e., chords. Production models would include (at least) a miniature joystick.

John McKown, an inventor in Scottsdale, AZ, abandoned long-standing ideas about how people input data and how computers receive it. He has won a patent for a wearable, one-handed keyboard that lets users type as they pace around an office, walk down the street, lean back in an airplane seat or are passing time standing around.

Convergence, ambient technology, and success in innovation

Stanford professor Terry Winograd was a founder and national president of Computer Professionals for Responsibility, and is currently on sabbatical at Google. He studied natural language processing under Seymour Papert at the MIT AI Lab. He has also worked at Xerox PARC.

Winograd: "Pre-Mosaic, the Web was uninteresting because it didn't have pictures. Transferring text and following links to other pieces of text seemed very academic. Putting images in completely changed the feel.

... The idea that you can index billions of pages and look for a word and get what you want is quite a trick.

... I always was interested in the question of how language worked. So, in that sense, I was a linguist. ... But I was never interested in subtleties about pronoun movement in Swahili."

Winograd to Larry Page, of Google: "There's a lot of stuff you guys are doing that has general applicability to human-computer interaction. It's not just about search engines. It's about how you interact with systems."

Winograd: "[I want to look at Google] from the perspective of what it can tell us about how people interact with systems in general and how might that be applied outside of search engines.

... Great innovations happen from time to time in history, but they're not something you can just will into being.