SBIR Phase II: Zulip threaded group chat

SBIR 第二阶段：Zulip 线程群聊

• 批准号: 1831273
• 负责人: Timothy Abbott
• 金额: $ 75万
• 依托单位: KANDRA LABS INC
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-09-15 至 2021-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1831273&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; II; Zulip; threaded

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will result from 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 him or her. 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 II project has three major research objectives: scaling the technology to teams of 10,000+ people; faithfully translating the user experience to mobile devices; and developing techniques for serving the needs of diverse deployments large and small. For scalability, one major area is "presence", telling each user who else is currently online. Presence data naturally grows with the number of pairs of users, therefore much faster than the number of users, and the company will need to develop algorithms to focus presence on significant connections between users. Among the unique challenges on mobile, the often-limited Internet connectivity demands algorithms that remember data previously fetched from the server to avoid asking for it again, carefully balanced with getting needed updates to never show out-of-date information to the user; the immediacy required for a great chat experience makes both horns of this dilemma especially sharp. Serving diverse deployments demands techniques for making software updates routine and seamless, a practice recently popularized in browsers and mobile apps but rarely accomplished to date in distributing server applications such as that described here.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第二阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力将源于群聊技术，它使知识工作者比以往任何时候都更有效地协作。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或她重要的那些对话。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）二期项目有三个主要的研究目标：将技术扩展到10000人以上的团队；忠实地将用户体验转化为移动设备；并开发满足大大小小的各种部署需求的技术。对于可伸缩性，一个主要方面是“存在”，告诉每个用户当前还有谁在线。在线状态数据自然会随着用户对数量的增长而增长，因此比用户数量的增长要快得多，公司需要开发算法来关注用户之间的重要联系。在移动设备上的独特挑战中，通常有限的互联网连接要求算法记住以前从服务器获取的数据，以避免再次请求，并仔细平衡所需的更新，以永远不会向用户显示过时的信息；良好的聊天体验所需要的即时性使得这一困境的两个角都显得尤为尖锐。服务于不同的部署需要使软件更新常规化和无缝化的技术，这种做法最近在浏览器和移动应用程序中很流行，但迄今为止在分发服务器应用程序（如本文所述）中很少实现。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。