Rachel Bellamy

I lead the IBM Research Human-Agent Collaboration group. This group investigates how to design intelligent agents that enable human collaboration. We specialize in desiging interfaces for form factors such as Cognitive Environments and Objects, where typically many users are interacting with the system synchronously or asynchronously. Our designs account for multi-user interaction, and awareness of other users and their activities. The team is interdisciplinary, consisting of designers, UI and UX engineers.

My personal research is in user experience design and participatory design practice. Recent research and design work has included work on cognitive user interfaces, studies of cognitive bias, design for mobile applications for hand-drawn computing, suport for business user's working with big data and interfaces for multi-factor mobile authentication. Past work inclues design of mobile applications such as WatchPad, and the Safeway Easi-Order application; and web applications such as IBM's SOX dashboard. I have also designed programming tools and environments. Before coming to IBM I worked in Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow part of Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group using participatory design to co-create informal multi-media authoring tools for use in the classroom.

My research into user experience includes research on how to support the software developer's experience. I have conducted usability and productivity assessments of expert debugging and parallel programming. My research also focuses on tools and methods for usability analysis, integrating usability into the software engineering life-cycle. Recently I have developed Human-Performance Regression Testing, which uses automatically generated GUI test cases to do analysis of human performance measures such as efficiency.