nyankelovich
| Forum role | Member since | Last activity | Topics created | Replies created |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Member | Feb 13, 2010 (16 years) |
- | 2 | 2 |
- Forum role
- Member
- Member since
Feb 13, 2010 (16 years)
- Last activity
- -
- Topics created
- 2
- Replies created
- 2
Bio
Nicole Yankelovich is the Founder and CEO of WonderBuilders, a consulting company specializing in creating highly customized 3D virtual worlds using Open Wonderland. In addition, Nicole is the Executive Director of the non-profit Open Wonderland Foundation and she holds a Visiting Scientist position at the MIT Center for Educational Computing Initiatives. Nicole started the Wonderland project in 2007 as Principal Investigator of the Collaborative Environments research program at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. This open source project, now a community-run effort governed by the Open Wonderland Foundation, is a toolkit for creating 3D virtual worlds for a wide range of training, education, business, and government applications.
Other research projects Nicole directed in her almost 20 years in Sun Labs include Porta-Person, a telepresence device; the Sun Labs Meeting Suite, a suite of tools to augment audio conferences; Awarenex, an instant messaging client with advanced presence features; SharedShell, a multi-user terminal program that works across firewalls; and SpeechActs, an early telephone-based natural-language speech application. Prior to joining Sun in 1991, Nicole worked on hypertext research at Brown University, helping to pioneer some of the now-familiar concepts embodied in the World Wide Web.
Nicole holds seven patents related to interaction design and has published numerous articles and book chapters on virtual worlds, collaborative environments, speech applications, and hypertext. She has served on the organizing and program committees of international conferences such as CHI, CSCW, UIST, ASSETS, and Hypertext, and she is a long-time steering committee member of BostonCHI, the Boston chapter of the ACM's special interest group on computer-human interaction.