Supporting Distributed Spatial Collaboration: An Investigation of Navigation and Radar View Techniques

Spatial collaboration is a complex problem where people work together within the context of a large, physical place. Our work investigates ways to support distributed, synchronous, spatial collaboration activities. We have conducted an experiment to examine techniques for supporting individual navigation and providing awareness information to the distributed users. Using a collaborative, two-dimensional map interface, we examined continuous and discrete styles of navigation as well as traditional and novel radar view techniques. The results revealed the advantages of continuous navigation, the issues inherent with discrete navigation, and the potential for novel radar view designs. We present the lessons learned from this study as well as some of the issues to consider in designing a spatial collaboration application.     

A collaborative virtual geographic environment based on P2P and Grid technologies

Solving a geographic problem usually requires collaborative work among a group of people in different geographic locations. Collaborative virtual geographic environment (CVGE), an integrated technology, offers an intuitive, efficient, and interactive visualization environment through which geographically separated users can explore complicated spatial information and conduct collaborative work. In this paper, two new technologies, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and Grid computing, are tightly coupled to develop a CVGE system. This paper evaluates the potential contributions of the P2P and Grid technology to CVGE systems. Using a Grid based system architecture efficiently integrates and shares geographically distributed resources as well as modeling procedures built on different platforms. To offer a shared and interactive virtual collaborative geographic environment for resolving geographic problems, we developed several P2P services including a terrain visualization collaboration service and a video collaboration service. Finally, a CVGE prototype system is implemented for collaboration on silt dam planning on the Loess plateau. The experimental results show that the scheme developed in this paper is efficient and feasible.     

Coordinating computer-mediated work

Coordination of inter-dependent work activities is central to CSCW. However, little is known about how people coordinate their work activities, especially when confronted with computer systems that are intended to support collaboration. This paper examines how a close-knit group of engineers attempt to collaborate when managing a networked system whilst at the same time trying to maintain coordination of their interdependent work activities. Drawing from theoretical constructs developed in distributed cognition, an analysis is presented that contrasts the role played by common objects and mediating mechanisms in coordinating such activities with the negotiative practices that emerge when they break down. The implications of the problematic and dynamic nature of coordination is subsequently discussed in relation to CSCW design.     

Mutual awareness in collaborative design: An Augmented Reality integrated telepresence system

Remote collaboration has become increasingly important and common in designers’ working routine. It is critical for geographically distributed designers to accurately perceive and comprehend other remote team members’ intentions and activities with a high level of awareness and presence as if they were working in the same room. More specifically, distributed cognition places emphasis on the social aspects of cognition and asserts that knowledge is distributed by placing memories, facts, or knowledge on objects, individuals, and tools in the environment they work. This paper proposes a new computer-mediated remote collaborative design system, TeleAR, to enhance the distributed cognition among remote designers by integrating Augmented Reality and telepresence technologies. This system can afford a high level externalization of shared resources, which includes gestures, design tools, design elements, and design materials. This paper further investigates how this system may affect designers’ communication and collaboration with focus on distributed cognition and mutual awareness. It also explores the critical communication-related issue addressed in the proposed system, including common ground and social capitals, perspective invariance, trust and spatial faithfulness.     

In formation: Support for flexibility, mobility, collaboration, and coherence

This paper describes support for flexibility, mobility and collaboration in engaging with, and making sense of, information. Our focus lies on the transitions people make between different, dynamic configurations of digital and physical materials, technologies, people and spaces. The technologies we describe have been developed in partnership with landscape architects over the past two years. We show that appliances and people can come together in a way that creates scope for such transitions, collaboration, and the emergence of new ways of working.     

协同系统中的角色及转换机制

作为拓展人类合作空间的辅助工具,CSCW(Computer Supported Cooperative Work)系统不但要利用计算机提供类似于面对面的协同环境,而且应该能够提供面对面协同环境所不能给予的工具。角色机制就是一种能够解决这个问题的好方法,它通过改变、转换处于协作活动中用户的身份和职位来更好地支持高效的协同工作。该文联系对象和角色思想, 讨论协同活动中的角色动态转换的实现。在角色机制的帮助下,用户将能够更灵活、更高效率地参与协同活动。     

Distribution and synchronisation of engineering information using active database technology

Today, work collaboration is normal practice in developing modern products. Engineering collaborative work involves a number of team members that need to share and exchange design ideas while working with engineering analysis tools such as mechanical computer aided engineering systems. This work presents the M-Sync prototype system that uses an active database approach to enable exchange of engineering information among distributed team members in a timely manner. The distributed data is fully accessible by the local member and is automatically synchronised between different places using a database management system that support event-condition-action (ECA) database rules. Only updates introduced at one location are distributed to other locations, thereby minimizing information transfer and enhancing performance. Members working at different locations can therefore work in a peer-to-peer (P2P) manner and interactively manipulate the same set of information at the same time.     

Articulating collaboration in a learning community

A common computer-based collaborative learning approach is to simply introduce contemporary computermediated communication technology into the classroom to support prescribed learning activities. This approach assumes that all students collaborate in similar ways and that presentday technology is sufficient to accommodate all collaboration forms. This view is superficial and limiting. Students collaborate in different ways at different levels on different learning activities. A more detailed articulation of collaboration in learning is crucial to understanding and extending the pedagogical capabilities and usefulness of collaborative technologies. A model is presented for a more finely articulated form of analysis that enumerates types of collaborative learning activities and evaluates how these activities may be supported through different design options. The analysis is based on actual classroom scenarios and the collaboration requirements that emerge from them. The authors have successfully applied this analysis model in the design of a computer-based collaborative learning environment for science education.     

Creating Interdependencies: Managing Incidents in Large Organizational Environments

In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of large-scale centers of command and control that bring together a range of personnel from various services responsible for the management of day-to-day incidents and events. These multicenter control rooms stand in marked contrast to what Suchman termed ‘centers of coordination’ (Suchman 1997), which have typically formed the focus of much research within HCI and Computer supported co-operative work (CSCW). In this paper, we explore the practices and technical resources within one of these very large multicenter control rooms. Staff in this control room do collaborate with colleagues who are copresent, but there is little reliance on the subtle interactional practices found in earlier studies. However, one information system is critical for collaboration and managing incidents that arise: the information system that is used to record incidents. Unlike in previous settings where records were made after an incident had taken place, these records are used for the concurrent management of activities. We consider the practices through which staff assemble these records to serve the demands of different individuals, with differing responsibilities in various organizations within the control room. We consider instances of copresent collaboration and suggest that these are often to ameliorate problems with the records rather than supporting real-time colocated activities. Although staff may be copresent in these multicenter control rooms, they have different kinds of technological resources available to them, and a different ‘division of labor.’ This can undermine the integration of these resources within forms of work. We conclude by discussing the implications for our understanding of copresent work and also for the methods and approaches we can draw upon for understanding these contemporary workplaces.     

Contrasting the use of tools for presentation and critique: Some cases from architectural education

This study investigates video recordings of design reviews in architectural education, focusing on how presentations and discussions of designs are contingent on the specific tools employed. In the analyzed recordings, three different setups are utilized: traditional posters, digital slide-show technologies, and combinations of the two. This range of different setups provides a set of contrasts that make visible the role of technologies in shaping the ways in which the reviews are conducted. The analysis is structured in three themes. First, we examine the sequential organization of digital presentations in relation to the spatial structure of poster-based presentations. Second, the different ways in which shared attention is established in digital, paper-based, and hybrid presentation practices are analyzed. Third, we address part-whole relations—how details in presented materials are put in relation to the overarching project or the presentation as a whole. Taken together, the analyses suggest that the detailed organization of the design review is transformed in subtle yet consequential ways through the introduction of digital slide-show technologies. These transformations are consequential not only locally, for the design review itself, but also for the instructive work that is accomplished through this practice. We conclude by discussing some implications for design, arguing that an increased awareness of how the practice is influenced by the different setups might be key for the proper adaptation of presentation technologies to particular purposes.     

A human-centric runtime framework for mixed service-oriented systems

A wide range of Web-based tools and socially-enhanced collaboration services have changed models of work. In today??s collaboration systems, interactions typically span a number of people and services to work on joint tasks or to solve emerging problems. Finding the right collaboration partner in Web-based interactions remains challenging due to scale and the temporary nature of collaborations. We argue that humans need different ways to indicate their availability and desire to join collaborations. In this work, we discuss collaboration scenarios where people define services based on their dynamically changing skills and expertise by using Human-Provided Services. This approach is motivated by the need to support novel service-oriented applications in emerging crowdsourcing environments. In such open and dynamic environments, user participation is often driven by intrinsic incentives and actors properties such as reputation. We present a framework enabling users to define personal services to cope with complex interactions. We focus on the discovery and provisioning of human expertise in service-oriented environments.     

ACI试点系统中资源管理模块的设计与实现

先进计算基础设施（ACI）是把地理上分布的高性能计算系统和其他资源用高速网络连接起来的一种基础设施。它是促进高性能计算的应用，推动跨地区，跨学科的科研合作的重要基础设施。为了在ACI试点系统的管理系统ACI－Manager中实现有效的资源共享和管理，本文设计并实现了ACI试点系统中的资源管理模块，在该模块中，资源被分为计算资源和信息资源两大类，并分别面向任务调度和用户操作实现了对两类资源不同方式的管理，实际应用明，这种设计与实现方式能够很好地解决资源的共享和管理问题。     

All in good time: knowledge introduction,restructuring, and development of shared opinions as different stages in collaborative writing

When learners collaborate with each other in order to elaborate on a particular subject, this collaboration may be influenced by the differing perspectives the learners have on the topic. There has been very little research to date on how differing perspectives have an impact in collaboration situations in which people are supposed to form a shared opinion on a particular topic. In this study, we analyzed which stages people’s activities pass through on their way to reaching shared opinions in a collaborative writing task. We examined how dyads of secondary school students, who in a previous instructional session had dealt with differing theoretical approaches to media effects, collaborated in writing a shared text about the topic of media violence. Quantitative analysis indicated that the participants engaged in different activities at different stages of the collaboration processes: In the early stages they were predominantly engaged in introducing the knowledge that they had acquired in the previous lesson. This activity was replaced in the middle stage of the collaboration by restructuring activities. Forming and phrasing shared opinions rarely occurred until very late in the collaboration, but played the leading role in the final stage. We applied a qualitative content analysis to illustrate these different activities by presenting examples of the collaboratively written texts. In doing so, we discuss the distinct activities as well as their character and functionalities for collaboration.     

Remote collaboration in virtual reality: asymmetrical effects of task distribution on spatial processing and mental workload

In the context of a remote collaboration task in virtual reality, this study aimed to analyze the effects of task distribution on the processing of spatial information and mental workload in spatial dialogs. Pairs of distant participants with specific roles (a guide and a manipulator) had to collaboratively move a virtual object in a plane factory mock-up. The displays allowed the participants to be immersed together in the virtual environment. We analyzed the dialogs that took place according to the frames of reference and the mental transformations required to produce the spatial statements. We also measured the associated mental workload. Results showed that when participants took a perspective, the manipulator’s point of view was preferred. Perspective-taking only yielded a moderate increase in mental rotations, which may explain a specifically high mental demand score for the guides’ NASA-TLX. Overall, this is in accordance with the least collaborative effort principle. This study reinforces the idea that, in collaboration, operators do not need the same aids as each other. Thus, it is not necessary to develop symmetrical tools, i.e., the same tools for all co-workers; instead, the needs of each operator should be taken into account, according to the task he has to perform. In our case, the guides would be helped with perspective-taking aids, while the manipulators would be helped with action-oriented tools.     

An empirical study of speed and communication in globally distributed software development

Global software development is rapidly becoming the norm for technology companies. Previous qualitative research suggests that distributed development may increase development cycle time for individual work items (modification requests). We use both data from the source code change management system and survey data to model the extent of delay in a distributed software development organization and explore several possible mechanisms for this delay. One key finding is that distributed work items appear to take about two and one-half times as long to complete as similar items where all the work is colocated. The data strongly suggest a mechanism for the delay, i.e., that distributed work items involve more people than comparable same-site work items, and the number of people involved is strongly related to the calendar time to complete a work item. We replicate the analysis of change data in a different organization with a different product and different sites and confirm our main findings. We also report survey results showing differences between same-site and distributed social networks, testing several hypotheses about characteristics of distributed social networks that may be related to delay. We discuss implications of our findings for practices and collaboration technology that have the potential for dramatically speeding distributed software development.     

Connecting generations: developing co-design methods for older adults and children

As new technologies emerge that can bring older adults together with children, little has been discussed by researchers concerning the design methods used to create these new technologies. Giving both children and older adults a voice in a shared design process comes with many challenges. This paper details an exploratory study focusing on connecting generations through cooperative design (co-design) methods that can enable idea construction and elaboration to flourish. Design techniques were adapted that ranged from low-tech prototyping and sticky-note feedback to distributed collaboration. The critical finding in this research was that children and older adults need not only time together to start the collaboration but also time apart to further the collaboration at a distance. This case study research reports on how our methods evolved and how others can apply these methods for their own work.     

DCLM framework: understanding collaboration in open-ended tabletop learning environments

There is a growing understanding of the unique ways that tabletops support effective collaboration; however, this research mostly focuses on environments in which learners work towards a single shared goal. Underpinning this perspective, either implicitly or explicitly, is the theory that collaborative learning is a process of attaining convergent conceptual change. However, this model of collaboration may not apply to all scenarios where learners are working together. In particular, informal, open-ended exploratory environments support (and often promote) shared activities where the goal may not be for all participants to emerge with a single, shared understanding. There is increased interest in understanding the efficacy of designs that support (and encourage) learners to collaborate while seeking divergent goals, ideas, and conceptions. This paper advances a framework (Divergent Collaboration Learning Mechanisms - DCLM) for recognizing and coding collaboration and divergent learning in such environments. We apply the DCLM framework to an informal tabletop environment (Oztoc) as a means of highlighting how DCLM may reveal new productive interactions environments that support divergent forms of collaboration, mentorship, and learning. Analysis of participants’ interactions within Oztoc revealed that participants who have non-aligned goals can still productively collaborate, and in many cases can provide insight and feedback that would not be possible in shared-goal activities. We conclude with an examination of how open-ended exploratory environments can support communities of practice and legitimate peripheral participation, and the importance of divergent inquiry and divergent conceptual change across a range of learning environments.     

Interactive Workspaces

We are rapidly entering a world in which people equip themselves with a small constellation of mobile devices and pass through environments rich in embedded technology. However, we are still a long way from harnessing the power of this technology in a way that seamlessly and invisibly assists users in their day-to-day activities. Bringing pervasive computing to maturity requires innovations in systems integration and human-computer interaction (HCI). To investigate these challenges, Stanford University's Interactive Workspaces project (http://iwork.stanford.edu/) is exploring team-based collaboration in technology-augmented environments. These workspaces are designed to allow groups of five to ten people to work together using computing and interaction devices on many scales.