SBIR Phase II: Zulip threaded group chat

小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第二阶段项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力将来自群聊技术，该技术使知识型员工能够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高效地进行实时和异步对话的工具，每个用户只阅读对他或她重要的对话。特别是，这项技术使团队能够在几个小时或几天的时间内异步举行的虚拟会议上做出决定。这与现有的群聊技术形成了鲜明对比，在现有的群聊技术中，对话通常在某人开始谈论其他事情后立即结束。对于需要跨不同地点和时区协调工作的大型团队来说，这种举行长时间虚拟会议的能力是非常宝贵的。随着即时通信和全球化使大型分布式团队成为未来的劳动力，大型分布式团队正迅速成为组织运营的标准。协调这些团队的努力对公司来说是一个巨大的痛点，这项技术是该领域最先进的一次飞跃。这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第二阶段项目有三个主要研究目标：将技术扩展到10,000人以上的团队；忠实地将用户体验转化为移动设备；以及开发技术以满足大大小小不同部署的需求。在可伸缩性方面，一个主要的方面是“在线”，告诉每个用户还有谁正在上网。在线状态数据自然会随着用户对数量的增加而增长，因此比用户数量快得多，该公司将需要开发算法，将在线状态集中在用户之间的重要联系上。在移动设备面临的独特挑战中，互联网连接往往有限，要求算法记住之前从服务器获取的数据，以避免再次请求数据，并仔细平衡获取所需更新以永远不向用户显示过时信息的需要；良好的聊天体验所需的即时性，使这一两难境地的两个角都变得尤为尖锐。为不同的部署服务需要使软件更新变得常规和无缝的技术，这一做法最近在浏览器和移动应用程序中流行，但在分发本文所述的服务器应用程序方面迄今很少实现。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.