Computer - Supported Cooperative Work - Concepts and Trends

The research field Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is concerned with understanding social interaction and the design, development, and evaluation of technical systems supporting social interaction in teams and communities – or in other words it is about researching the use of computer-based technology for supporting collaboration. The field was coined in the 1980th by researchers from computer science, information science and social science. In this paper we will briefly introduce CSCW – its concepts and current trends - and thereby focus on the role of Informatics in the field – from application integration to ubiquitous user interfaces

Computer-supported cooperative work in design

Systems design is a complex activity requiring the cooperation of multi-disciplinary teams. Most of the time, these teams are located in different places and use different software applications for various purposes. Distribution and heterogeneity obstacles make the work of design teams challenging. This appeals for new approaches to support teams

DYNAMIC CONTEXTUALIZATION IN COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK

Computer-mediated collaboration, a dominant mode of organizational communication particularly in dispersed and multinational organizations, introduces unique opportunities but also new problems. One of these problems is the higher risk of misunderstandings, which is more likely to occur in computer-mediated teamwork than in face-to-face teams (Cramton, 2001). Moreover, it may be particularly acute when distributed workers come from different functional backgrounds, holding different perspectives (Dougherty, 1992; Powell et al., 2004). Dispersed collaborations are also likely to suffer problems of culture since collaborators are embedded in a different local work setting with its own rules, language, histories, and myths (Armstrong & Cole, 2002). Current theories of communication suggest that misunderstanding may be reduced by contextualization, i.e., providing contextual information to explain a core message. However, a central hypothesize in the current research, is that contextualization is beneficial in some situations but not in others. Treating contextualization as a form of adaptive behavior, the research model aims to understand its contingent impact on performance in collaborative tasks. The motivation for contextualization is explained, arguing that it can be predicted by the extent to which the perspectives of the collaborators are different or shared: a difference of perspectives between collaborators motivates them to contextualize in order to increase mutual understanding and thereby increase performance. Computer support should also motivate communicators to contextualize by making it easier for them to do so. A controlled experiment tested these relationships in a collaborative machine-assembly task performed by dyads. The collaborators\u27 perspectives and the level of computer support were manipulated, and contextualization behavior, mutual understanding and performance were measured. Results show that contextualization is effective only for dyads with different perspectives and may be detrimental when perspectives are similar. When computer support is available, users may contextualize even if it is counterproductive. Therefore, computer-mediated collaboration should be designed to ensure only effective contextualization. Some potential practical implications for collaborative systems are offered

EMANCIPATION OF AND BY COMPUTER-SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK

Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) currently arouses plenty of interest. New types of applications have entered the market and new areas of work get computerized support. It is asserted in this paper that these technologies have potential areas of use also in other kinds of environments than what currently is typical. In order to approach the proposition, a conceptual framework is presented: collaboration is interpreted as coordination of organizational tasks. In accordance with the conceptual framework, examples of industrial uses of the CSCW-technologies are sketched. Three simplified classes of these technologies, using the terminology in a broad sense, are employed: electronic mail, hypertext, and calendar systems. It is claimed in this paper that the new uses of CSCW-technologies would, on the one hand, emancipate the industrial users from the environment of conventional applications and, on the other hand, emancipate the CSCW-technologies themselves from the restricted territory of office uses. The introduction of· new types of technologies in work organizations is, however, not considered unproblematic. The application environment may develop into a complex one, and the benefits of the new technologies may become questionable. Such consequences and other implications of the broadened CSCW-domain are also discussed. Especially user support and organizational concerns are focused on

Groupware Technology and Software Reuse

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is a research field concerned with the design and implementation of systems to support cooperative work. Such systems are usually called Groupware. Although Software Reusability (SR) is not commonly mentioned as an issue in the CSCW community, there are some obvious overlaps in design issues and methodologies.\ud In this paper I will argue that reusability issues are of particular importance to groupware technology and relate our experiences in this matte

#Bieber + #Blast = #BieberBlast: Early Prediction of Popular Hashtag Compounds

Compounding of natural language units is a very common phenomena. In this paper, we show, for the first time, that Twitter hashtags which, could be considered as correlates of such linguistic units, undergo compounding. We identify reasons for this compounding and propose a prediction model that can identify with 77.07% accuracy if a pair of hashtags compounding in the near future (i.e., 2 months after compounding) shall become popular. At longer times T = 6, 10 months the accuracies are 77.52% and 79.13% respectively. This technique has strong implications to trending hashtag recommendation since newly formed hashtag compounds can be recommended early, even before the compounding has taken place. Further, humans can predict compounds with an overall accuracy of only 48.7% (treated as baseline). Notably, while humans can discriminate the relatively easier cases, the automatic framework is successful in classifying the relatively harder cases.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 9 tables, published in CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing) 2016. in Proceedings of 19th ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2016

[[alternative]]Design and Implementation a Computer Supported Cooperative Work System

計畫編號：NSC87-2213-E032-005研究期間：199708~199807研究經費：254,000[[abstract]]近年來，電腦互助系統（CSCW）隨著網際網路的蓬勃發展，受到多媒體領域研究學者的普遍重視。然而，CSCW的基本技術與多媒體簡報極其相似，主持人與共同主持人在多媒體簡報領域也提出了先進的見解（詳見MultimediaPublication List）。除此之外，CSCW牽涉到分散式系統架構以及網路傳輸與管理方面和多媒體網路同步技術，主持人與共同主持人針對這點，曾先後在C16與C21兩篇論文中提出了一個分散式的多媒體資料庫系統以及於C27中對游標、語音同步技術的探討，相信在主持人與共同主持人細心規劃以及在國科會的大力支持下，以主持人與共同主持人之經驗，定能如期完成本計畫。[[sponsorship]]行政院國家科學委員