combinFormation is a creativity support tool that uses composition to represent information while a human is searching for, browsing, collecting, and arranging image and text clippings from web pages and other documents. The clippings act as visual, semiotic, and navigational surrogates (bookmarks) for the documents. Participant and agents collaborate to find relevant information resources, extract surrogates, and compose the information surrogates in a visual and navigational interactive space.

Teaching Team Coordination with Location-aware Games is a project for teaching team coordination using location-aware games. It takes ethnography of fire emergency response work practice as a basis, and develops simulations of aspects of team coordination. Real-world actions map to game activity, as players work together to find real goals and avoid virtual hazards.

The sensory interface systems research area develops new environments, devices and forms of communication, using low power sensors, computers, and networking. Ethnography is performed to develop understanding of human practices. System prototypes are designed to acquire sensor data. Relevant patterns are recognized. Context is modeled based on the recognized patterns. Affordances are designed: the system responds with clear feedback, so the participant knows what the current state is and what is possible, and with media, to stimulate the particpants' senses. Evaluations are conducted, and the design is iterated.

Interface Ecosystems is a metaframework, an epistemological underpinning that connects theory and practice, constructing the interface as a border zone between heterogeneous systems of representation: organic and machinic; physical and electronic; analog and digital; cultural and economic; text, image, and sound; and engineering, science, humanities, and the arts. Forms and processes are transformed by investigation of new connections between representational systems. Identification of differences stimulates the production of new knowledge. An example is interdisciplinary collaboration, in which the process of resolving mismatches between methodologies can serve as a catalyst for developing innovative inter-methodologies.

Information discovery builds on creative cognition, sensemaking, and information seeking to investigate creative ideation in the context of processes and practices of information finding. In an information discovery task, the human goal is to generate and develop ideas. This requires finding and collecting elements of relevant information, and developing understanding of the found elements and their relationships. The task context may be academic, such as paper writing or thesis formulation, industrial, such as inventing a new product or service, or personal, such as designing a career. We have developed quantitative measures of creativity, such as variety, originality, and emergence for information discovery tasks.

Hurricane Recovery: Collecting Locative Media to Rebuild Local Knowledge Engages in an iterative participatory process of reaching out to evacuee communities subsequent to Hurricane Katrina, gathering information about needs and desires, building situated semantics and a locative media collection sensemaking system, and using the system to collect, organize, and re-present images, interviews, and metadata. Digital photographs are connected with GPS sensor data, semantics, a zoomable map interface, and an image clustering algorithm.

Test Collection consists of a set of documents, a clearly formed problem that an algorithm is supposed to provide solutions to, and the answers that the algorithm should produce when executed on the documents. The present research develops an open source Test Collection Digital Library System. The system enables collecting and labeling documents, and publishing the resulting test collections.

ecologylab.xml is an open source inter-language translation framework for distributed information semantics.