IBM Research has been active in virtually all areas of Web-related research since the Web’s inception. This has involved providing dynamic data at some of the most highly accessed Web sites in the world, new techniques for searching and characterizing the Web, contributions to standards affecting the entire industry, creating the infrastructure allowing the Web to move to XML, and the development of cooperative and collaborative applications enabled by the Web.

We have pioneered new techniques for efficiently serving dynamic content. Our work has addressed the challenging problem of publishing large amounts of dynamically changing content while handling high peak loads. The techniques resulting from our research have been deployed at some of the most highly accessed sports Web sites in the world, including the 1998 Nagano Olympic Web Site, Master's Golf tournament, Wimbledon, US Open Tennis Tournament, and the Sydney 2000 Olympic Web. Over the last three years, these sites have maintained 100% availability despite increases of orders of magnitude in publishing requirements (up to 100Ks of changes per day) and in peak hit rates (up to 1.2M hits per minute).

Other Web performance work has focussed on caching, load balancing, Web server acceleration, Web traffic characterization, optimization and benchmarking of Web server performance, transparent discovery of network performance, and server support for gigabit networking.This work has gone into products such as IBM’s Network Dispatcher and resulted in several important publications.

The Web's transition to XML is being charted at IBM Research. We are creating the infrastructure for the Web to move to XML as its transport data encoding and for much of its data persistence, providing for a number of things, including 1) a modular XHTML system that will integrate SMIL (multimedia), XForms, MathML, P3P (controlled disclosure of private information) into HTML over time; 2) ability to separate information content and information rendering, and put them together again using the powerful XSL stylesheet language; and 3) ability for application or industry specific markup vocabularies, described with XML Schema language and queried with XML Query Language. The work we do involves a tight cycle of conceptualization, prototyping, and direct participation in W3C and IETF working groups. By building reference middleware, reference development tools, chairing working groups, writing the formal specifications as editors. donating code to Open Source Efforts, and creating browser plug-ins and mobile device clients, we have multiple perspectives that allow us to make appropriate tradeoffs between developer simplicity and evolvability/scalability of the Web. A major focus area is support for dynamic content (sourced from sensors, databases) and multi-party e-business integration. We are also enabling "Web Services" through our XML Protocols work. Another project focusses on the "distance" among people in a collaborative environment - breaking the isolation and providing group awareness and, at the same time, keeping the privacy. Distance, as an abstract concept here, refers to the degree of objective difficulties in sensing other people through taste, touch, smell, hearing, and sight. In our approach, awareness is provided by multi-device event perception; and distance is adjusted by multiagent cooperation and negotiation. We are exploring methods on multiagent negotiation such that "distances" among people can be adjusted intelligently. Another effort designs techniques to deal with information overload in today's interconnected world of Web and Intranet servers. We focus on unstructured and semi-structured information sources such as hypertext. Although the Web is growing exponentially, the individual's capacity to read and digest matter is essentially fixed. Most of us react to information explosion by reading only relevant and authoritative matter. Relevance depends on the user and the information need; these can be characterized by the documents that the user has seen or liked, and their link structure. Authority or quality can be attributed to documents based on hyperlink citations. Various techniques based on machine learning and graph algorithms are being used to mine documents in large hypertext databases for relevance and quality

New approaches to integrating the browser into the desktop, in an O/S-independent manner but using the shell's native affordances, with user-customized automation using scripting (invoking both local and network-hosted services), are also being prototyped. We are also investigating how to overcome two of the most difficult aspects of remote collaboration - common ground and group focus. Work involves modeling group behavior in collaborative environments and using these models to inform design of improved collaboration spaces. In one project, we are investigating the use of virtual participants in a synchronous collaborative environment to maintain focus on common goals and open lines of group communication to resolve conflicts. In another project, we are building tools to help participants better manage extended asynchronous threads of interaction.

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