43,674 research outputs found
Experiential Role of Artefacts in Cooperative Design
The role of material artefacts in supporting distributed and co-located work practices has been well acknowledged within the HCI and CSCW research. In this paper, we show that in addition to their ecological, coordinative and organizational support, artefacts also play an âexperientialâ role. In this case, artefacts not only improve efficiency or have a purely functional role (e.g. allowing people to complete tasks quickly), but the presence and manifestations of these artefacts bring quality and richness to peopleâs performance and help in making better sense of their everyday lives. In a domain like industrial design, such artefacts play an important role for supporting creativity and innovation. Based on our prolonged ethnographic fieldwork on understanding cooperative design practices of industrial design students and researchers, we describe several experiential practices that are supported by mundane artefacts like sketches, drawings, physical models and explorative prototypes â used and developed in designersâ everyday work. Our main intention to carry out this kind of research is to develop technologies to support designersâ everyday practices. We believe that with the emergence of ubiquitous computing, there is a growing need to focus on personal, emotional and social side of peopleâs everyday experiences. By focusing on the experiential practices of designers, we can provide a holistic view in the design of new interactive technologies
A Decentralized Mobile Computing Network for Multi-Robot Systems Operations
Collective animal behaviors are paradigmatic examples of fully decentralized
operations involving complex collective computations such as collective turns
in flocks of birds or collective harvesting by ants. These systems offer a
unique source of inspiration for the development of fault-tolerant and
self-healing multi-robot systems capable of operating in dynamic environments.
Specifically, swarm robotics emerged and is significantly growing on these
premises. However, to date, most swarm robotics systems reported in the
literature involve basic computational tasks---averages and other algebraic
operations. In this paper, we introduce a novel Collective computing framework
based on the swarming paradigm, which exhibits the key innate features of
swarms: robustness, scalability and flexibility. Unlike Edge computing, the
proposed Collective computing framework is truly decentralized and does not
require user intervention or additional servers to sustain its operations. This
Collective computing framework is applied to the complex task of collective
mapping, in which multiple robots aim at cooperatively map a large area. Our
results confirm the effectiveness of the cooperative strategy, its robustness
to the loss of multiple units, as well as its scalability. Furthermore, the
topology of the interconnecting network is found to greatly influence the
performance of the collective action.Comment: Accepted for Publication in Proc. 9th IEEE Annual Ubiquitous
Computing, Electronics & Mobile Communication Conferenc
Online cooperation learning environment : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
This project aims to create an online cooperation learning environment for students who study the same paper. Firstly, the whole class will be divided into several tutorial peer groups. One tutorial group includes five to seven students. The students can discuss with each other in the same study group, which is assigned by the lecturer. This is achieved via an online cooperation learning environment application (OCLE), which consists of a web based J2EE application and a peer to peer (P2P) java application, cooperative learning tool (CLT). It can reduce web server traffic significantly during online tutorial discussion time
Strong scaling of general-purpose molecular dynamics simulations on GPUs
We describe a highly optimized implementation of MPI domain decomposition in
a GPU-enabled, general-purpose molecular dynamics code, HOOMD-blue (Anderson
and Glotzer, arXiv:1308.5587). Our approach is inspired by a traditional
CPU-based code, LAMMPS (Plimpton, J. Comp. Phys. 117, 1995), but is implemented
within a code that was designed for execution on GPUs from the start (Anderson
et al., J. Comp. Phys. 227, 2008). The software supports short-ranged pair
force and bond force fields and achieves optimal GPU performance using an
autotuning algorithm. We are able to demonstrate equivalent or superior scaling
on up to 3,375 GPUs in Lennard-Jones and dissipative particle dynamics (DPD)
simulations of up to 108 million particles. GPUDirect RDMA capabilities in
recent GPU generations provide better performance in full double precision
calculations. For a representative polymer physics application, HOOMD-blue 1.0
provides an effective GPU vs. CPU node speed-up of 12.5x.Comment: 30 pages, 14 figure
Evaluating groupware support for software engineering students
Software engineering tasks, during both development and maintenance, typically involve teamwork using computers. Team members rarely work on isolated computers. An underlying assumption of our research is that software engineering teams will work more effectively if adequately supported by network-based groupware technology. Experience of working with groupware and evaluating groupware systems will also give software engineering students a direct appreciation of the requirements of engineering such systems.
This research is investigating the provision of such network-based support for software engineering students and the impact these tools have on their groupwork. We will first describe our experiences gained through the introduction of an asynchronous virtual environment  SEGWorld to support groupwork during the Software Engineering Group (SEG) project undertaken by all second year undergraduates within the Department of Computer Science. Secondly we will describe our Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) module which has been introduced into the students' final year of study as a direct
result of our experience with SEG, and in particular its role within Software Engineering. Within this CSCW module the students have had the opportunity to evaluate various
groupware tools. This has enabled them to take a retrospective view of their experience of SEGWorld and its underlying system, BSCW, one year on. We report our findings for SEG in the form of a discussion of the hypotheses we formulated on how the SEGs would use SEGWorld, and present an initial qualitative assessment of student feedback from the CSCW module
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