Modelling Shared Contexts in Cooperative Environments: Concept, Implementation, and Evaluation

Users who work together require adequate information about their cooperative environment: about other group members presence and activities, about shared artefacts, etc. In the CSCW literature several concepts, prototypes, and systems for providing this group awareness information have been presented. In general, they capture information from the environment, process it, and present it to the users. This paper addresses the processing aspect; in particular, we present a concept for processing awareness information by means of awareness contexts. With this concept we address the problem of contextualising event notifications enabling the presentation of notifications in the appropriate user situation. We describe a lightweight model and its integration into an event and notification infrastructure. We report on an empirical study, and draw some conclusions for the design of context-awareness for cooperative environments.     

Designing an extensible architecture for Personalized Ambient Information

Ambient displays provide us with information in the background of our awareness. However, as each user has individual wishes and needs of how, which and when information is presented, the acceptance of ambient displays is low.In this paper we introduce an extensible architecture for personalized ambient information.We employ a notification system to extend the capability of a fixture to display more than one variable. Multiple variables can be updated by multiple information providers. Thereby, our architecture covers a broader spectrum of notifications from alarms to ambient information.We evaluate our concept within a dual-task experiment in comparison to preset notifications. The results show a level of self-interruption which is significantly lower than using preset notifications. Therefore our approach outperforms preset notifications and moves ambient displays closer to secondary displays in human–computer interaction.     

Architecture, implementation and application of complex event processing in enterprise information systems based on RFID

Enterprises have to be increasingly agile and responsive to address the challenges posed by the fast moving market. With the software architecture evolving into service-oriented architecture, and the adoption of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), event processing can fit well in enterprise information systems in terms of facilitation of event aggregation into high level actionable information, and event response to improve the responsiveness. To make it more applicable, the architecture of event processing in enterprise information systems is proposed; event meta model is put forth, and the rules are defined. To improve the detect efficiency, classification and partition of event instance is utilized. We have implemented the event processing mechanism in enterprise information systems based on RFID, including the data structures, optimization strategies and algorithm that is considered as one of the contributions. The performance evaluations show that the method is effective in terms of scalability and the capability of event processing. Complex event processing can improve operation efficiency and discover more actionable information, which is justified by the application.

Robot Awareness in Cooperative Mobile Robot Learning

Most of the straight-forward learning approaches in cooperative robotics imply for each learning robot a state space growth exponential in the number of team members. To remedy the exponentially large state space, we propose to investigate a less demanding cooperation mechanism—i.e., various levels of awareness—instead of communication. We define awareness as the perception of other robots locations and actions. We recognize four different levels (or degrees) of awareness which imply different amounts of additional information and therefore have different impacts on the search space size ((0), (1), (N), o(N),¹ where N is the number of robots in the team). There are trivial arguments in favor of avoiding binding the increase of the search space size to the number of team members. We advocate that, by studying the maximum number of neighbor robots in the application context, it is possible to tune the parameters associated with a (1) increase of the search space size and allow good learning performance. We use the cooperative multi-robot observation of multiple moving targets (CMOMMT) application to illustrate our method. We verify that awareness allows cooperation, that cooperation shows better performance than a purely collective behavior and that learned cooperation shows better results than learned collective behavior.     

A Web-Based Knowledge Network for Supporting Emerging Internet Applications

Although the Internet and the World Wide Web technologies have gained a tremendous amount of popularity among people and organizations, the network that these technologies created is not much more than a multimedia data network. It provides tools and services for people to browse and search for data but does not provide the facilities for automatically delivering the relevant information for supporting decision–making to the right people or applications at the right time. Nor does it provide the means for users to enter and share their knowledge that would be useful for making the right decisions. In this work, we introduce the concept of a Web–based knowledge network, which allows users and organizations to publish, not only their multimedia data, but also their knowledge in terms of events, parameterized event filters, customizable rules and triggers that are associated with their data and application systems. Operations on the data and application systems may post events over the Internet to trigger the processing of rules defined by both information providers and consumers. The knowledge network is constructed by a number of replicable software components, which can be installed at various network sites. They, together with the existing Web servers, form a network of knowledge Web servers.     

Managing cooperation in e-business systems

E-Business management involves monitoring and controlling all forms of business transactions conducted over the Internet, extranets, and related communications technologies and services. As such, it includes the management of networks, systems, and software applications. E-Business management is beginning to depend increasingly on knowledge of the cooperative aspects of partners in a business chain and the cooperative aspects of stake-holders in e-business operations. The study of cooperation offers many opportunities to apply social network analyses to derive software solutions for the management of e-business. This article provides a methodology and case study that recognises the dimension of cooperation among a multiplicity of organisations, coined “Awareness-based Cooperative Management.” It is aimed towards the design or re-engineering of effective e-business management systems, where the key concept involves the degree of awareness held by e-business stake-holders. Awareness is defined in terms of stake-holder interactions and artefacts used in those interactions such as buyer specifications, requests for proposals, offers, service level agreements, and the like. Since awareness is an indispensable, albeit an inherently vague concept, we cast it and reason about it with the apparatus of fuzzy logic.

Supporting Conceptual Awareness with Pedagogical Agents

This paper describes a series of efforts in building and conceptualizing software agents for distributed collaborative learning. The agents are referred to as pedagogical agents. We have integrated pedagogical agents within two collaborative environments, TeamWave Workplace and Future Learning Environment. The role of agents in these environments differs from past work on software agents in their function as extended awareness mechanisms, focusing on task and concept awareness (conceptual awareness). Our approach is stimulated by Meads theory of the Generalized Other. The agents collect statistical information on user activity and analyze the information based on principles of collaboration and knowledge building (participation, group interaction, and scientific discourse). Furthermore, the agents define a trajectory in a pedagogical agent design space, which we define in terms of four dimensions: presentation, intervention, task, and pedagogy. We end the paper by comparing our approach with related work.This revised version was published online in March 2005 with corrections to the cover dateThe CoPAS study presented in this article was performed while the author was a graduate student at the Department of information science, University of Bergen, Norway     

Improving Generalization with Active Learning

Active learning differs from learning from examples in that the learning algorithm assumes at least some control over what part of the input domain it receives information about. In some situations, active learning is provably more powerful than learning from examples alone, giving better generalization for a fixed number of training examples.In this article, we consider the problem of learning a binary concept in the absence of noise. We describe a formalism for active concept learning calledselective sampling and show how it may be approximately implemented by a neural network. In selective sampling, a learner receives distribution information from the environment and queries an oracle on parts of the domain it considers useful. We test our implementation, called anSG-network, on three domains and observe significant improvement in generalization.A preliminary version of this article appears as Cohn et al. (1990).     

Software Agent-Oriented Frameworks for Global Query Processing

The paper introduces the concept of software agent-oriented frameworks for global query processing in an interoperable environment. Such an environment is developed for the purpose of making cooperative interactions between several systems. These latter are distributed on networks and may present several incompatibilities. The global query processing is applied to the SIGAL project which aims at developing an interoperable environment for georeferenced digital libraries. This environment provides users with services that will free them from worrying about information distribution and disparities.     

Local accessibility,local reachability,and representations of compact groups

In this paper we consider the local controllability problem for nonlinear control systems, or as we prefer to call it, the local reachability problem. We introduce the action of a compact group on the system, and define what it means for the system to be invariant under the group action. Our principal result gives sufficient conditions, in terms of the group action, in order that a locally accessible system is also locally reachable. The technique used is a generalization of one first introduced by P. Brunovsky for odd systems invariant under a certainZ ₂ action. We give both geometric and group representational interpretations of our conditions, and provide examples of our conditions applied to certain even systems which do not satisfy Brunovsky's conditions.     

From event calculus to the scheduling problem. Semantics of action and temporal reasoning in aircraft maintenance

In this work we are interested in the logical and semantical aspects of reasoning about actions in a scheduling process. We present an adaptation of the event calculus of Kowalski and Sergot to the problem of determining the temporal structure of the operations that must be performed during the realization of some complex objectives. Our application domain is aircraft maintenance. We try to reason about the actions which are performed during an overhaul in order to help to schedule them. The original model reasons about changes, i.e. events which initiate or terminate propositions. The first step of this work was to improve the initial model by adding a temporal relation between events and propositions because in our field we also have to reason about events which only inform us about some propositions without affecting them. The second step of this work is to build a set of specific rules which temporally interpret the semantics of the usual specifications of the actions to be considered. This interpretation aims to associate each action with two events and some temporal relations which are usable by the general model. Temporal reasoning uses pertinent knowledge about the specific universe (here, the aircraft that we consider and the actions which may be performed on it). We outline a generative methodology to formalize this relevant knowledge efficiently. This cognitive approach brings more informational economy in temporal reasoning because only the relevant information is considered The temporal reasoning model and the methodology have been exemplified and tested on a complex part of an aircraft. In the future, adapted tools based on this approach will be developed, in order to solve several problems of aircraft maintenance scheduling.     

The Wearable Motherboard™: The first generation of adaptive and responsive textile structures (ARTS) for medical applications

Virtual reality (VR) has been making inroads into medicine in a broad spectrum of applications, including medical education, surgical training, telemedicine, surgery and the treatment of phobias and eating disorders. The extensive and innovative applications of VR in medicine, made possible by the rapid advancements in information technology, have been driven by the need to reduce the cost of healthcare while enhancing the quality of life for human beings.In this paper, we discuss the design, development and realisation of an innovative technology known as the Georgia Tech Wearable Motherboard (GTWM), or the Smart Shirt. The principal advantage of GTWM is that it provides, for the first time, a very systematic way of monitoring the vital signs of humans in an unobtrusive manner. The flexible databus integrated into the structure transmits the information to monitoring devices such as an EKG machine, a temperature recorder, a voice recorder, etc. GTWM is lightweight and can be worn easily by anyone, from infants to senior citizens. We present the universal characteristics of the interface pioneered by the Georgia Tech Wearable Motherboard and explore the potential applications of the technology in areas ranging from combat to geriatric care. The GTWM is the realisation of a personal information processing system that gives new meaning to the termubiquitous computing. Just as the spreadsheet pioneered the field of information processing that brought computing to the masses, it is anticipated that the Georgia Tech Wearable Motherboard will bring personalised and affordable healthcare monitoring to the population at large.     

Notifications Efficiency,Impact, and Interference in Second-Screen Scenarios

The growing use of second-screen devices stresses the importance of finding a balance between engagement, distraction, and disturbance of its users, while simultaneously watching television. In this framework, this article reports on a study designed to analyze the efficiency, impact, and interference of different notification strategies aiming to identify the best approach to be used when an alert is needed in second-screen scenarios.

A prototype able to deliver synchronized information related with TV content, with intervals of 10, 30 and 60 s, followed by individual or combined notifications (e.g., audio, visual, and haptic—on the tablet and visual—on the TV) was developed. A laboratory adapted to replicate a living room was set up and a test that involved watching three segments of a 20-min clip while using the prototype was carried with 30 participants, under a cognitive walk-through protocol.

Quantitative and qualitative results show that receiving notifications while watching TV is effective in alerting users about new information, despite its inherent cognitive disturbance for the TV viewing experience. It was also possible to highlight that in an HCI perspective, the most suitable strategy for integrating notifications (considering type and cadence) should be based on a combination of a visual notification (displayed only on the TV screen) along with a haptic notification (vibration on the tablet); spaced by an interval of at least 30 s.     

Using Real-Time Stereo Vision for Mobile Robot Navigation

This paper describes a working vision-based mobile robot that navigates and autonomously explores its environment while building occupancy grid maps of the environment. We present a method for reducing stereo vision disparity images to two-dimensional map information. Stereo vision has several attributes that set it apart from other sensors more commonly used for occupancy grid mapping. We discuss these attributes, the errors that some of them create, and how to overcome them. We reduce errors by segmenting disparity images based on continuous disparity surfaces to reject spikes caused by stereo mismatches. Stereo vision processing and map updates are done at 5 Hz and the robot moves at speeds of 300 cm/s.     

Coordination mechanisms: Towards a conceptual foundation of CSCW systems design

The paper outlines an approach to CSCW systems design based on the concept of coordination mechanisms. The concept of coordination mechanisms has been developed as a generalization of phenomena described in empirical investigations of the use of artifacts for the purpose of coordinating cooperative activities in different work domains. On the basis of the evidence of this corpus of empirical studies, the paper outlines a theory of the use of artifacts for coordination purposes in cooperative work settings, derives a set of general requirements for computational coordination mechanisms, and sketches the architecture of Ariadne, a CSCW infrastructure for constructing and running such malleable and linkable computational coordination mechanisms.The first version of this paper was written while Carla Simone was with the University of Milano.     

Applying a dynamic testability technique to debugging certain classes of software faults

Testability, the tendency for software to reveal its faults during testing, is an important issue for verification and quality assurance. But testability can also be used to good advantage as a debugging technique. Although this concept is more general, we will illustrate it with a specific example: propagation analysis.Propagation Analysis (PA) is a technique for predicting the probability that a data state error affects program output. PA is a technique that produces information about a piece of software's testability. PA bases its prediction on empirical measurement of the probability that an artificial data state error affects program output. After obtaining propagation analysis information for a program and obtaining a failure probability estimate for the program during execution we build a model that can be used to identify possible sites of missing-assignment faults of the form x f(x). Thus we can apply the testability technique PA as a debugging tool.This work supported by a National Research Council NASA-Langley Resident Research Associateship and NASA-Langley Grant NAG-1-884.     

Visually Guided Cooperative Robot Actions Based on Information Quality

In field environments it is not usually possible to provide robots in advance with valid geometric models of its environment and task element locations. The robot or robot teams need to create and use these models to locate critical task elements by performing appropriate sensor based actions. This paper presents a multi-agent algorithm for a manipulator guidance task based on cooperative visual feedback in an unknown environment. First, an information-based iterative algorithm to intelligently plan the robots visual exploration strategy is used to enable it to efficiently build 3D models of its environment and task elements. The algorithm uses the measured scene information to find the next camera position based on expected new information content of that pose. This is achieved by utilizing a metric derived from Shannons information theory to determine optimal sensing poses for the agent(s) mapping a highly unstructured environment. Second, after an appropriate environment model has been built, the quality of the information content in the model is used to determine the constraint-based optimum view for task execution. The algorithm is applicable for both an individual agent as well as multiple cooperating agents. Simulation and experimental demonstrations on a cooperative robot platform performing a two component insertion/mating task in the field show the effectiveness of this algorithm.     

Information Sharing via Projection Function for Coexistence of Robot and Human

Various kinds of service robots will be used in environment coexisting with humans. To realize the coexistence of a robot and a human, the robot must share task information with the person via an adequate interface. We propose a projection function as the interface for information sharing. We construct a projection system to prove the information sharing efficiency, and develop several modes of interaction between the robot and the human in the projection system.     

Exploratory analysis of concept and document spaces with connectionist networks

Exploratory analysis is an area of increasing interest in the computational linguistics arena. Pragmatically speaking, exploratory analysis may be paraphrased as natural language processing by means of analyzing large corpora of text. Concerning the analysis, appropriate means are statistics, on the one hand, and artificial neural networks, on the other hand. As a challenging application area for exploratory analysis of text corpora we may certainly identify text databases, be it information retrieval or information filtering systems. With this paper we present recent findings of exploratory analysis based on both statistical and neural models applied to legal text corpora. Concerning the artificial neural networks, we rely on a model adhering to the unsupervised learning paradigm. This choice appears naturally when taking into account the specific properties of large text corpora where one is faced with the fact that input-output-mappings as required by supervised learning models cannot be provided beforehand to a satisfying extent. This is due to the fact of the highly changing contents of text archives. In a nutshell, artificial neural networks count for their highly robust behavior regarding the parameters for model optimization. In particular, we found statistical classification techniques much more susceptible to minor parameter variations than unsupervised artificial neural networks. In this paper we describe two different lines of research in exploratory analysis. First, we use the classification methods for concept analysis. The general goal is to uncover different meanings of one and the same natural language concept. A task that, obviously, is of specific importance during the creation of thesauri. As a convenient environment to present the results we selected the legal term of neutrality, which is a perfect representative of a concept having a number of highly divergent meanings. Second, we describe the classification methods in the setting of document classification. The ultimate goal in such an application is to uncover semantic similarities of various text documents in order to increase the efficiency of an information retrieval system. In this sense, document classification has its fixed position in information retrieval research from the very beginning. Nowadays renewed massive interest in document classification may be witnessed due to the appearance of large-scale digital libraries.     

Interpreting disjunctive logic programs based on a strong sense of disjunction

This paper studies a strong form of disjunctive information in deductive databases. The basic idea is that a disjunctionA B should be considered true only in the case when neitherA norB can be inferred, but the disjunctionA B is true. Under this interpretation, databases may be inconsistent. For those databases that are consistent, it is shown that a unique minimal model exists. We study a fixpoint theory and present a sound and complete proof procedure for query processing in consistent databases. For a class of inconsistent databases, we obtain a declarative semantics by selecting an interpretation that maximizes satisfaction, and minimizes indefiniteness. Two notions of negation are introduced.