SBIR Phase I: Zulip threaded group chat

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是群聊技术，它使知识工作者能够比以往更有效地协作。它是第一个使用户能够在同一系统中有效地执行实时和异步对话的工具，每个用户只读取对他们重要的那些对话。特别是，该技术使团队能够在虚拟会议中做出决策，这些会议在数小时或数天的时间内异步进行。这与现有的群聊技术形成了鲜明对比，在群聊技术中，只要有人开始谈论其他话题，对话就会结束。这种进行长时间运行的虚拟会议的能力对于需要跨不同地点和时区协调工作的大型团队来说是无价的。大型、分布式的团队正迅速成为组织运作的标准，因为即时通信和全球化使这样的团队成为未来的劳动力。协调这些团队的工作对公司来说是一个巨大的痛点，而这项技术是该领域最先进技术的一次飞跃。这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目有两个关键的研究目标：将技术扩展到10,000+规模的团队，并确定将技术移植到移动设备的可行性。一个主要的可扩展性研究领域是搜索。该公司设想这项技术将成为决策的主要场所，从而成为知识存储的主要场所，如此之快，全文搜索很重要，尽管聊天产生的流量比电子邮件多得多。移动领域的一个研究领域是人机交互的挑战，即如何在一个小的移动屏幕上显示丰富的对话导航选项。这个问题是这种技术所特有的，因为长时间运行的异步会话意味着用户通常不会按照严格的时间顺序读取消息。该公司预计第一阶段的拨款将使其能够开发搜索可扩展性问题的工作解决方案，以及高性能和高效移动用户体验的工作原型。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is group chat technology that enables knowledge workers to collaborate more effectively than ever before. It is the first tool built that empowers users to efficiently carry out both real-time and asynchronous conversations in the same system, with each user reading only those conversations that are important to them. In particular, the technology empowers teams to make decisions in virtual meetings that take place asynchronously over periods of hours or days. This is in contrast with existing group chat technology, where conversations usually end as soon as someone starts talking about something else. This ability to conduct long running, virtual meetings is invaluable for large teams that need to coordinate work across different locations and time zones. Large, distributed teams are fast becoming the norm for how organizations operate, as instant communication and globalization make such teams the workforce of the future. Coordinating the efforts of such teams is a huge pain point for companies, and this technology is a leap in the state of the art in this space.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project has two key research objectives: scaling the technology to work for teams of size 10,000+, and determining the feasibility of porting the technology to mobile. A major scalability research area is search. The company envisions the technology to be the primary place where decisions are made, and hence a primary place where knowledge is stored, so fast, full-text search is important, despite the fact that chat generates much more traffic than email. One research area on mobile is the HCI challenge of displaying rich options for conversation navigation on a small mobile screen. The problem is unique to this technology, since having long running, asynchronous conversations means that users do not typically read messages in a strictly chronological fashion. The company anticipates the Phase I grant will enable it to develop a working solution to the search scalability problem, and a working prototype of a performant and productive mobile user experience.