Julia H Grace

Contact Information
julia (at) cs.unc.edu | twitter.com/jewelia | facebook.com/juliagrace | CV

Upcoming Conferences
NEW Call for Participation: CHI 2010 Workshop on Microblogging: What and How Can We Learn From It?

Today
> I am social computing researcher at the IBM Almaden Research Center in the User Sciences & Experience Research (USER) Group in San Jose, California.
> I am part of the IBM Center for Social Software.
> I am on the Computer History Museum's NextGen Advisory Board, promoting the Computer History Museum among a new, younger demographic.

My current research is focused on how to use social networks and other social computing technologies in large enterprises; I often tell people I work at the intersection of computer science and sociology. Please take a look at my cv for the details of all work thus far.

Recent Publications

Grace, J., Gruhl, D., Haas, K. and Robson, C. Encouraging collaboration for unstructured data analysis. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008). CHI '08 – Social Data Analysis Workshop
Alba, A., Bhagwan, V., Grace, J., Gruhl, D., Haas, K., Nagarajan, M., Pieper, J., Robson, C., and Sahoo, N. 2008. Applications of Voting Theory to Information Mashups. In Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE international Conference on Semantic Computing - Volume 00 (San Jose, CA, USA, August 4 - 7, 2008).
Robson, C., and Grace, J., 2008. Criteria for a Successful Sale: How to match Sales leads with Delivery Experts. In Proceedings of the 2008 Production and Operations Management Society Conference (San Diego, CA, USA, May 9 - May 12, 2008).
Grace, J., Robson, C., and Pierce, J., 2008. Community Building within Enterprise Blogs, An iPhone Blog Story. In Proceedings of the ACM 2008 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (San Diego, CA, USA, November 8 - 12, 2008). CSCW '08 - Workshop on Social Networking in Organizations
Pieper, J., Grace, J. and Dill, S. Team Analytics: Understanding Teams in the Global Workplace. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Seventh Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 4 - 9, 2009). CHI '09
Behal, A., Grace, J., Kato, L. and Chen, Y. 2008. COBRA - A Visualization Solution to Monitor and Analyze Consumer Generated Medias. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (July 19 – 24, 2009). HCI ‘09.
Grace, J., and Robson, C. Enterprise Social Networking: History, Current Practices, and Research Challenges. In The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference (Tucson, AZ, USA, September 30 – October 3, 2009).

Press Biography
Julia Grace is social computing researcher at the IBM Almaden Research Center in the User Sciences and Experience Research (USER) Group in San Jose, CA. Building on a passion for both computer science and sociology, she competed her Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2007, focusing on communication and collaboration in online communities. Her current research is focused on informal communication in the workplace, including how to use technologies such as microblogging and social networking sites in large enterprises.

A little history
My childhood was split between Albuquerque, New Mexico and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I started writing BASIC programs as a freshman in high school; I thought programming was quite possibly the coolest thing ever, and from that point on I knew I would be a computer scientist. I graduated from high school in 1999, the salutatorian and student body president, and attended The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that fall.

In 2003 I received my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with Honors, and I remember thinking -- on graduation day -- how much more I wanted to learn about computer science; I felt as though I had just touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of all the interesting facets of CS. At that point I decided that I would eventually attend graduate school.

From 2003-2005 I worked as an IT Consultant for CapTech Ventures -- a small consulting firm in Richmond, Virginia. I needed a couple years of "real world" work experience to figure out exactly what I wanted to do with my life, and what I wanted to study in graduate school. Richmond is a beautiful city, and I have great memories from living there.

I went back to Chapel Hill to receive my Master of Science in Computer Science in May 2007. While at Carolina, I was lucky to work with awesome professors like Kevin Jeffay and Diane Pozefsky. One of my projects in graduate school was a joint effort between the computer science and medicinal chemistry departments at UNC; I worked with Alex Tropsha on a web-based Chemoinformatics system used for computer aided drug design.

I moved to California shortly after graduation, and the rest is history.

On a personal note...

@jewelia: My first, middle and last names all have 5 characters -- this was problematic because generally speaking, usernames for most systems must be greater than 5 characters. I first faced this predicament my freshman year of college when picking my email address. Instead of doing something logical, like combining my first and last names or creating some variant of them, I chose "jewelia". This stuck with me, and that is explanation behind my twitter username, among other things.
@Running: I have been a runner for almost my entire adult life; I have competed in road races all across the United States. My distances are generally 10Ks to 1/2 marathons. After moving to California, I started backpacking, skiing, kayaking, and taking advantage of all the awesome national parks and wilderness areas here. I also do yoga 2-3 times a week to keep me sane and balanced.
@Prius: I have a silver 2007 Prius. I love that car, dispite the only fact that I'm the only Prius owner in the bay area who is under 40.
@Photography: For a period of my life I owned a Nikon SLR from the 1970s - I took a lot of pictures, developed and printed them myself. At some point during college I decided I needed to take a break. I got rid of my camera gear, and now the only camera I have is my iPhone (yes, you read that correctly - I don't own a digital camera).
@Commercial: I was in an IBM Commercial that aired during April/May/June 2009 (yes, it was very exciting!).