ISAAC research focused on making computer-assisted collaboration in real-time decision support, science, engineering, and education domains more natural, more powerful, and more responsive to the multi-modal communications needs of users.

Historically, trying to work together via extant computer tools has been chronically limiting. The ISAAC collaboration system enables users to function in an information environment without regard for the temporal nature of the tools they use. Through a series of modality boundary crossing efforts, ISAAC users are able to retrieve, forward, and re-use information regardless of the synchronous or asynchronous nature of the information source or destination.