We are creating a living laboratory, termed Planet Blue, to understand how people will interact with the emerging world of the wireless Internet. Our initial focus is on the knowledge worker and how the knowledge worker interacts with other people, with information, and with organizations. A team of over 40 behavioral and computer scientists, across five of our research labs, is working to define user scenarios and to build compelling applications that will be deployed in studies with real users and within IBM Research itself. The applications will help drive requirements of the underlying infrastructure needed to support them. Planet Blue will help define the future of post-PC personal computing and drive our research in information access devices.

In order to deliver applications to different kinds of access devices, we will develop and use wireless networking and pervasive computing technologies. Two other critical areas of our focus are user interfaces, in order to get the end user experience right, and knowledge acquisition and
management, in order to target relevant information to end users as precisely as possible. Applications focus on assisting individuals and teams.

The goal for Planet Blue, stated simply, is to create and deploy a technology-assisted immersive environment used by knowledge workers in their daily lives, in which individuals and teams can create, learn, use and share knowledge with few limitations or disruptions, regardless of
physical location or context. We are trying to remove the technology from the consciousness of our users. We want computing to disappear into the background as well, leaving only the power of computation and global access - without the annoyances of techno-trivia. This means that we
need to seamlessly integrate a number of applications with information, and focus on making interaction with both as transparent as possible. As an example, a simple conversation relates to a number of different kinds of information, including calendaring and tasks. We must make the creation of these shared tasks trivial, and we must allow for appropriate access to a number of different information axes from different kinds of access devices, spanning small wireless devices and desktops.

Please contact Paridhi Verma to obtain copies of the Computer Science Brochure