Dorée Duncan Seligmann, Director, Collaborative Applications Research, Avaya Labs, Avaya

Dorée Duncan Seligmann is the director of Collaborative Applications Research at Avaya Labs, the research and development group of Avaya, a leading global provider of business communications applications, systems and services. Her work encompasses social software, communication-enabling businesses processes, context-aware applications, presence-based technologies, mobile communication solutions, communications middleware, user-interface techniques and speech-based systems. She holds 12 patents and, since joining Avaya, has filed over 50 patents ranging in topics from informative ringbacks to intelligent context-based systems.

Dorée focuses on developing new systems that enable people to communicate more effectively and efficiently, with a high quality user experience. To that end, her research focus includes aesthetic considerations, mechanisms to increase ease-of-use and a user's control over devices, and systems that use contextual information to intelligently select the “who, what, where, when, and how” of communications.

Dorée was a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories where she helped build Rapport, an early multimedia conferencing system, and application sharing system and MMCX, an early VoIP communications systems product. She then developed Archways, an automatically generated shared virtual environment with 3D graphics and 3D sound and video to support multimedia communications. She started the Metaphorium, an experimental Web Site, as an on-line laboratory to explore Internet-based communications that featured MessageInABottle (messaging), SandTypewriter/SkyWriter and the IsleOfWrite (bulletin board and real-time notices), SubwaySurface (to browse through photographs), and LiveWebStationary (visualizing web traffic and usage) . Each blended form, content, and function into a highly visual environment to enable users unconventional ways for people to connect, share and communicate.

Dorée has received an A.B. in anthropology from Harvard; her thesis is on Irish and Irish-American pubs. While living in Paris, she started an English language theater. She returned to the United States, earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University and joined Bell Laboratories. Her thesis system, IBIS (Intent-based Illustration System) automatically generated dynamic graphics for COMET, a coordinated multimedia explanation system, and the head-mounted display used in KARMA, an early augmented-reality system.

Dorée has edited a book about her great-aunt, dancer Isadora Duncan, entitled: Life Into Art: Isadora Duncan and Her World. She is associative editor in chief for IEEE MultiMedia.

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