Abstract

First talk (Maja):

blogIT: Electronic Chronicling and Analysis of Contact Center Operations

(joint work with Mark Podlasec and Gopal Pingali from IBM T .J. Watson Research Center)

Current tools for contact centers fall far short of providing appropriate mechanisms for capturing and maintaining detailed descriptions of technical problems, solutions, and the processes by which these solutions are located and applied. To facilitate the effective acquisition and sharing of this information, we have developed a digital journaling system that unifies multiple activity sources and depicts a comprehensive view of IT operations, including personal interactions and generated artifacts. This system, which we call blogIT, is comprised of data loggers, which are responsible for automatic capture of problem-solving activities, annotation tools, which facilitate spontaneous recording and sharing of insights, and an analytics engine, which performs concept extraction from the archived multimodal data.

In this talk, I will demonstrate how blogIT integrates job ticket histories with other support activity (email, chat sessions, phones calls, etc.) into electronic chronicles, which can be illuminated with relevant documents, RSS feeds, images, and video clips. I also demonstrate that converting existing problem tickets from an in-house database with over 5 million records (structured data) into searchable blog entries (unstructured data) is an effective, practical, and scalable approach to increase the likelihood of first call resolution. Finally, I discuss preliminary results of chronicle analytics, as a first step toward deriving business process statistics, contact networks, solution experts, and best practices. blogIT that has been developed as part of my summer project at Smart Business Environments Group at IBM T .J. Watson Research Center

Second talk (Greg):

Students with visual impairments struggle in a classroom setting due to the visual nature of lectures and the inherent visual nature of information presented on a whiteboard, blackboard, or a digital display. Students generally sit between 4 and 20 metres away from a blackboard, sometimes making it difficult for even an average-sighted student to read professors’ writing, and almost impossible for students with visual impairments. Utalizing high-resolution digital cameras it is possible to capture the contents of a whiteboard in real time to allow presentation to a student with a visual disability without requiring the lecturer to adapt to new technologies.