Joe.Bolinger

BlackTie
Strategy and Tactics for Social Software

As part of my current research I am working on a design framework for building collaborative tools that are integrated with social governance processes. It is much easier to approach design from the point of view of single individuals than it is to approach it from the perspective of an entire group of people. Worse, individual and group needs are often in conflict with one another (ever had a manager ask you to do something that you did not like…). As part of my research I am trying to develop design patterns for collaborative systems that can help showcase examples of good designs, explain the tradeoffs involved, and strike a balance between strategic group needs, such as self-governance and transparency, without neglecting fundamental tactical user needs, like usability. BlackTie is a prototype system that I have developed as an experimental test bed for exploring these issues using research methods from both the computational and social sciences.

Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement
Curriculum Creation & Evaluation

I worked with Dr. Rajiv Ramnath to create course materials for a graduate software engineering course, CSE 757, using the project artifacts from industry sponsored student projects completed by either myself or other students. The challenge was to find ways to package and present these artifacts in a manner that is suitable for a quarter long course without sacrificing the realism and idiosyncratic details that made the projects genuine examples of software development practices.

Collaboration Tool Selection
Observations at a Large IT Organization

I took part in a group of students that observed a team in a large IT organization tasked with the goal of selecting a set of collaboration tools to support various internal projects. Through this effort we were exposed to a number of individual teams and industrial processes, mostly concerned with software development or maintenance.

Capacity Management
Observations at a Large IT Organization

As part of a graduate course in Enterprise Architecture I observed capacity management policies in a large IT organization. The observations were compared with a survey of the literature and measured against current industry trends. We reported our findings as part of the course and our relationship with the organization resulted in additional student projects on more specific capacity management initiatives such as energy conservation and green computing.

Data Mining
For Fun & Profit

As part of a set of graduate courses in information retrieval and data mining I developed an email classifier that could predict if incoming messages needed a personal response by the recipient. I also compared models for predicting the ending prices of online auctions using various feature sets, such as bidding velocity, structured product characteristics, and unstructured descriptive text.

Architecture Patterns
Extraction & Knowledge Management

I worked with a group of students to analyze a set of architecture documents collected from a number of internal projects in a software development organization. We located and documented similar patterns found in the architectures that had strong potential for reuse or as learning aids. The patterns were presented to senior enterprise architects at the organization in an effort to reinforce a pattern-based approach to architecture that the organization was working to adopt.