Nicole Yankelovich
Principal Investigator, Collaborative Environments, Project Wonderland Lead
Sun Microsystems Laboratories

Nicole Yankelovich is Principal Investigator of the Collaborative Environments research program at Sun Microsystems Laboratories in Burlington, MA. She is also the team lead for Project Wonderland (http://ProjectWonderland.com), an open source toolkit for building 3D virtual environments targeted at business and education collaboration. Her areas of expertise include virtual worlds, collaborative computing, speech applications, hypertext, and user experience design. Research projects she has directed in her almost 20 years in Sun Labs include Porta-Person, a telepresence device; the Sun Labs Meeting Suite, a suite of tools to augment audio conferences; Awarenex, an instant messaging client with advanced presence features; and SharedShell, a multi-user terminal program that works across firewalls. Nicole holds six patents related to interaction design and has published numerous articles and book chapters on collaborative environments, speech applications, and hypertext.