UNC Collaboratory Project: Overview

This report describes a new project in computer supported collaboration for scientific and engineering professionals, made possible by support from NSF, IBM, and ONR. For over twenty years the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill has successfully conducted research on systems for intelligence amplification. Our longest continuing project of this kind has been the application of interactive computer graphics to assist a biochemist elucidating the structure of a complex protein molecule. A more recent project has developed a hypertext based system designed to support authors of scientific, technical, and other expository documents. Crucial to our success has been the selection of driving problems whose solutions have been of significance not merely to us as tool builders, but also to professionals in other disciplines. We have used the systems we built to study their human users engaged in complex intellectual tasks. As computers and communication have become more intertwined, with great strides in the development of distributed systems, and with the growing necessity for team science, we believe the time is right to select a new driving problem -- support for multiple professionals working in collaboration.