and Thomas Moran—the same Thomas
Moran who co-authored The Psychology
of Human-Computer Interaction in 1983!
I feel very lucky to have worked with such
well-known figures, and together, they
made a great team of mentors.
Tara Matthews was very hands-on
in guiding the research and helping me
make sense of the data we were gathering, while Tom Moran knew how to
frame larger picture feedback. I also
made friends with a number of other researchers at Almaden, both in and outside my field, with whom I still keep in
touch and consider important mentors
in my life. One thing that undergraduate students may not realize is just how
important it is to meet new mentors
while interning to help expand your
network of professional contacts.
IBM Research–Almaden
San Jose, California
IBM Research—Almaden in Cali- fornia’s Silicon Valley, is one of the ight laboratories that make up IBM Research. They might be best
known for inventing the relational database, which helped to establish the
emerging discipline of service science.
In researcher circles, the lab is also
sometimes referred to as “the Kitty
Hawk of nanotechnology” (Kitty Hawk
was the site where the Wright brothers
flew the first powered aircraft).
I was an intern at IBM Research Almaden the summer after my second year
as a Ph.D. student at Georgia Institute
of Technology, where I study human-centered computing. It was my second
industry internship out of the three I’ve
done so far in my Ph.D. career.
I found the internship position because a Georgia Tech alumni, who is
currently employed at IBM Research,
posted the open position on one of the
university’s email lists.
Because it’s a division of IBM, Almaden’s mission, in part, is to collaborate with IBM’s products division
to create and improve the things that
IBM sells. But the larger goal is to ad-
vance scientific understanding in
n science and technology, including
fundamental science, nanotechnol-
ogy, spin physics and photoresists;
n computer science, including content
management, human-computer in-
teraction, text analytics, services-ori-
ented architectures and most recently
healthcare informatics;
n service science research, focusing
on large scale, people-and informa-
tion-intensive challenges; and
n storage systems, from storage and
file systems to server software and
systems management.
PEOPLE
While I was an intern, I spent three
months working with Tara Matthews
WORK
At the beginning of my internship, I was
a little worried because the work done
at IBM is very different from my thesis
research. I study communication systems for separated children and parents. But my mentors were helpful in
suggesting papers that I should read to
get up to speed, and both were very patient during my first two weeks while I
caught up and familiarized myself with
the literature and the system. The project we decided to do was a good match
for my skills and interests. I conducted in-depth interviews and a content
analysis of work created by the users
of an organizational tool called Lotus
Connections Activities. It was my first
opportunity to evaluate a technology
that has been used for many months
by several thousand people.
The work was fascinating! We ended
up publishing the results of our investigation in a full paper which we presented at the INTERACT conference
( http://interact2011.org/).
More importantly to me personally
was that working at IBM made me realize that I prefer the style of research
done in the industry compared to that
