Feel Good Inc.

When I fake cry, my nose wobbles, it’s like a weird flary nostrils spasmy thing. I only tell you this useful nugget so that if you saw me now, you would know this tearful goodbye is genuine.

So we just came back from the Extreme Blue Expo at the IBM labs Boeblingen, Germany. It was pretty hectic. We got to meet lots of cool students working on lots of exciting projects too. We also got to show case our own project, which was really exciting, and people responded well to it. Today is our last day in the office IBM is turfing us out, twelve weeks of Extreme Blue, lots of free tat, and lots of fun times. I hope you have enjoyed the blog, sorry it was just me talking, Mandy are the strong silent types, and Andy B is an international man of business and therefore has no time for the small matter of blogging.

We would like to say a huge thank you to all the super smart people we worked with, for their bright ideas, enthusiasm and patience.

The Mentors:

• Darren Shaw
• Michael Bradley
• Gareth Jones
• Jay Dykes
• Ailun Yi
• Helen Bowyer
• Matt Whitbourne
• Cathy Tucker

And the many people who gave us advice:

Karen Allen, Kevin Brown, Robi Bruner, Sacha Chua, Scott Clee & Geoff Pirie, Neil Simpson, Joan DiMicco, Helen Govan, Frank Jania, Tony Mobbs, Luis Suarez Rodriguez, Jenny Tydeman and Mark Swinson, Tracee Wolf, The SONAR team-Ido Guy & Inbal Ronden, The alphaWorks team- Cynthia Peranandam, Jim Thoensen, Lynn Haney, Steve Luyendyk, Brent Zupp, and the TAP team- Chris Wyble.

I know, I know- this post is long over due. Posting it now sort of eludes to the fact that we didn’t know this information earlier, which of course is not true, there was a plan all along, I just didn’t have time to write about it…

Group Persona Visualisation- what’s in the box guys?

Well, our metrics producer looks at feeds from MSN, Twitter, Last.FM, Wordpress, Blogger, and then any other RSS feed you care to add. It looks at your activities across these feeds and gauges how lively you are. It also looks at how much your activities involve other people and gauges how interactive you are. It also looks at the recent events in your feeds and returns a recent event, which is a bit of text and an associated photo, this is either a photo from your feed, or the result of a search using significant terms from the post. As the icing on the cake, it takes all the text you have written and uses machine learning to estimate what emotions you have mostly been feeling. For those lucky enough to be inside the IBM firewall, we have a TAP version which uses the aforementioned feeds and also our very own cattail, dogear, fringe, Bluetwit, Sametime, Beehive, Blog Central and other such internal gooey goodness- thanks to the SONAR team for that.

All these metrics are available through our API, so whilst you can use our visualisations, you can also build one of your own that represents the data in the way that is most meaningful to you.

What’s next?

We have a few bugs to iron out in the website and the Flash, most of which have will be covered by the next code update. Group Persona Visualisation will be hosted on alphaWorks for the next three months. We (Andy A, Andy B, Matt and I) will be heading back to our respective universities to finish our degrees and be students again.

Don’t you just hate it, when you meet a guy from work in the street, and you know you should be able to remember their name, but you can’t, and you’re with your wife, and the whole scenario is just aching for an introduction, but you can’t remember this guys name, and so you’re left with this weird stifled conversation where he’s waiting to be introduced and you’re doing your best to avoid it. Well this is kind of like that right now.

I’m just going to swallow my pride. Twelve weeks in, I’m introducing you to the team, and I’m sorry it didn’t happen sooner. Here is a quite gritty looking photo of us all:

Courtesy of Darren Shaw

(L-R)

Andy A is a student in the Internet Computer Science Honours Programme at the University of St. Andrews. He co-developed the back-end of the software, including fetcher technology and database and standards calculations. He also implemented the project’s website.

Matt is working toward an M.Sci. in natural sciences (physics) from the University of Cambridge. His responsibilities included co-development of the back-end of the technology and system architecture. He was most highly involved in determining the standards by which the technology calculates group data. Matt and Andy share an office, and together they make “Mandy”

Alice (Me!!) I am a student in the Computer Science Programme at the University of York. I created the Flash visualisations that portray group data.

Andy B is working toward an MBA in global management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management (seriously, the Thunderbirds have a school!) His work included scoping and project management, networking for stakeholder input, and executing the internal marketing strategy.

Dear readers,

It will excite you to know, that we have launched on alphaWorks! We are known as Group Persona Visualisation and you can sign up now, create your own groups, and of course, see them visualised.

After twelve weeks of intensive labour, we are really pleased with how it turned out, and are off to demo it at the European Extreme Blue Expo in Boeblingen in Germany.

In visualisation news, we have tearfully said goodbye to our trusty newsreader, my Dad, and welcomed in not one but two fresh new faces. We are also now visualising emotions in FlashyBlobby, which we are gauging using machine learning from any text that comes up in your feeds. I hope you enjoy the changes, which you can see when you sign up to on alphaWorks.

I’m throwing out new versions of Flashy Blobby like they’re free XL t-shirts at an IBM team building event.
Here’s the latest and greatest.

This last week has been extremely busy for the Feel Good Inc team. On Friday we presented to the senior leadership team at IBM Hursley and the feedback was positive. For a project such as ours, which is difficult to put $-values on or discuss things such as market potential, its refreshing to see support from IBM’s leadership towards this kind of software. Having said that, however, as I’m writing the business case for where Feel Good Inc goes in September, if you know where I can find some accurate data on the value of Web 2.0 software or research on the effectiveness of highlly-collaborative teams, please let me know.

Thursday was a big day for us as we dropped our first code with alphaWorks. In late August/early September, the website functioning with 2 visualisations should be launching on aW for all who’re interested to use, suggest feedback and, with our API, possibly do some development of your own. It was a big moment in our summer in that it showed we made a functioning version of the technology. We’re stilll adding attributes on top and polishing up the details, but the framework is there to build on.

One of those early visualisations is called news feed. Its a play off CNN/BBC news channels, but tailored to your team…

We’ll replace the good looking man talking in the future with someone a little more “newsreader-ish” but Alice’s Dad did a great demo. You have to love when he touches his ear and throws it out to the field. Anyway,

• the Headline bar is a summation from the data pulled about your team.
• The scrolling bar below updates you on activities from the feeds your teammates have done (such as the title of their most recent blog post or the last file they updated in SVN/CVS).
• The bottom is similar to a stockticker showing the state of your team’s current metrics and whether they’re headed up or down.

So where as the flashyblobby viz is a little more abstract, the news reader puts all the activity right in front of you. I think both work to help you know pretty quickly the status of your team or group.

Tony Mobbs suggested that daily or weekly announcements can be recorded via small cameras and replace the news reader with notices personal to your team (say an announcement or a presentation). Its a pretty interesting idea that we’re going to continue to explore.

When you look at this, is there anything that jumps to mind on how it would be more valuable to your team (ways to make it more effective, additions that could be valuable or other applications)? We’re searching for maximum input to please feel free to share any comments.

I know you, my target audience, are unlikely to share the same penchant for bad chick tv (America’s Next Top Model, Mean Girls, Bring It On, Grease) as me, but you are going to have to just bear with me, because the first rule when blogging, is stick to what you know. Or so I’ve been told…
Anyway, this part of “Extreme Blue-The Musical!” goes a little something like this…

You (played by John Travolta): “Flashy Blobby!?”

Flashy Bobby (played by Olivia Newton John): “Tell me about it, stud”

You: I got chiiiiiiils, they’re multiplyin’ and I’m losin’ control…

Yeah, it’s that end sequence in Grease, where Olivia Newton John comes to the fair ground, and she’s in those tight leather trousers, and John Travolta is like “whoa, she’s way more foxy now she’s ditched those lemon coloured cardigans and poodle skirts“. This is what is happening with you and Flashy Blobby right now. We’ve lost the frumpy colours and predictable movement, and brought in a simple flocking algorithm and a nice blur filter. I’m pleased.

Do you know what every young intern needs? Balls!

The juggling balls come in six exciting colours, and are reasonably good for throwing at people, or so I have observed.

FlashyBlobby v2 has some files parsed from an SVN feed, It makes my mum feel sea sick. This is a deviation from the actual plan (the cascading files that is, not the sickness, that was planned from the outset) but it was cobbled together quickly to demonstrate that we can show such data.

This week I have been showing the love to another totally different data visualisation which I’ll blog about at some point. FlashyBlobby will be getting some time on Monday though. I think it’s going to be a bit like that episode of America’s Next Top Model where they give the nice sweet all American girls Mohawks, bald patches and other ‘high fashion’ haircuts. It’s always the best episode. Anyway, hopefully the makeover will take FlashyBlobby on to be Feel Good Inc’s next top Visualisation. Or at least stop inducing nausea in members of my family…

Nothing says “student” like the inability to say no to free stuff. That and the smell of stale beer, but we’ll leave that one alone. IBM, like any large company is big on branded tat. Over the coming weeks “Tatwatch 2008″ will be documenting the great tat that has been thrown our way, starting off with (drum roll please) the Extreme Blue branded bag.

Useful for carting around your (definitely NOT tat) IBM T61p Think Pad, and also a selection of other workplace essentials. This bag promises functionality above all else.

It’s tricky to take an artful photograph of a rucksack. I googled it, and got peanuts. I was going to get one of my team mates to pull some kind of “smart casual” pose, perhaps looking thoughtfully into the distance, but they kept demanding glasses full of red m&ms and Evian chilled to precise temperatures. Oh, and before you say it, I know the bottom photo isn’t even in focus, I know.