The award supports research into Expertise Networks: the technical augmentation of the ad-hoc social networks by which people seek information, answer questions, and accomplish tasks. This research undertakes case studies of expertise use in current organizational setting in order to more fully understand the social requirement in augmenting an expertise network. The proposed research also designs, implements, and evaluates mechanisms for finding and storing expertise. A result of this research will be the Ad-Hoc Memory System designed to provide a range of services to augment expertise networks. This system includes distributed CSCW components such as information distilleries to create expertise artifacts from informal interactions, expertise beacons to signal the location of expertise agents to locate expertise, and user interface mechanisms to handle the increase in queries. The emphasis is on finding new ways to augment people's expertise, rather than automating, and in providing usability through examining social requirements.
