Data-Centric Collaboration for Wired and Wireless Platforms

With the proliferation of mobile computing devices there is an increasing demand for applications supporting collaboration among users working in the field and in the office. A key component for collaboration in this domain is sharing and manipulation of information using very different devices and communications. We propose a novel, data-centric collaboration paradigm, where each user can obtain a subset of the shared data and the data may be visualized differently for different users. The data amount and the visualization technique reflect the user’s interests and/or computing and communication capabilities. The users collaborate on and exchange data, and the data is dynamically transformed to adapt to the particular computing/network platform. The resulting design is simple yet very powerful and scalable. It is implemented and tested by developing several complex groupware applications

Data-Centric Collaboration for Wired and Wireless Platforms

With the proliferation of mobile computing devices there is an increasing demand for applications supporting collaboration among users working in the field and in the office. A key component for collaboration in this domain is sharing and manipulation of information using very different devices and communications. We propose a novel, data-centric collaboration paradigm, where each user can obtain a subset of the shared data and the data may be visualized differently for different users. The data amount and the visualization technique reflect the user’s interests and/or computing and communication capabilities. The users collaborate on and exchange data, and the data is dynamically transformed to adapt to the particular computing/network platform. The resulting design is simple yet very powerful and scalable. It is implemented and tested by developing several complex groupware applications

Network Awareness for Wireless Peer-to-Peer Collaborative Environments

Presentation to the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Science. Hilton Waikoloa Village, Island of Hawaii, 5-8 January 2004.The implications of using mobile wireless communications are significant for emerging peer-to-peer (P2P) collaborative environments. From a networking perspective, the use of wireless technologies to support collaboration may impact bandwidth and spectrum utilization. This paper explores the effects of providing feedback to system users regarding wireless P2P network behavior on the performance of collaboration support applications. We refer to this operational feedback as "network awareness." The underlying premise is that providing feedback on the status of the network will enable users to self-organize their behavior to maintain quality of data sharing. Results achieved during an experiment conducted at the Naval Postgraduate School demonstrate significant effects of roaming on application sharing performance and integration with client-server applications. A solution for improving network aware P2P collaboration, identified in the experiment, is discussed

Disease surveillance and patient care in remote regions: an exploratory study of collaboration among healthcare professionals in Amazonia

The development and deployment of information technology, particularly mobile tools, to support collaboration between different groups of healthcare professionals has been viewed as a promising way to improve disease surveillance and patient care in remote regions. The effects of global climate change combined with rapid changes to land cover and use in Amazonia are believed to be contributing to the spread of vector-borne emerging and neglected diseases. This makes empowering and providing support for local healthcare providers all the more important. We investigate the use of information technology in this context to support professionals whose activities range from diagnosing diseases and monitoring their spread to developing policies to deal with outbreaks. An analysis of stakeholders, their roles and requirements, is presented which encompasses results of fieldwork and of a process of design and prototyping complemented by questionnaires and targeted interviews. Findings are analysed with respect to the tasks of diagnosis, training of local healthcare professionals, and gathering, sharing and visualisation of data for purposes of epidemiological research and disease surveillance. Methodological issues regarding the elicitation of cooperation and collaboration requirements are discussed and implications are drawn with respect to the use of technology in tackling emerging and neglected diseases

An International GIS and Data Curation Dissemination Framework Using Mobile Devices: A Purdue-Aalto University Example

The Purdue University Libraries in collaboration Aalto University Library presents a framework for an international method of bridging geospatial resources from one university campus to another. It should be noted that this is a small-scale framework based on open policy, open access and the Group of Earth Observation Systems of Systems (GEOSS) values of sharing data, resources and cyber-infrastructure capacity. This framework advocates that library services could pioneer knowledge dissemination efforts in a low cost manner utilizing mobile devices that can link international users with resources and advance international collaborative inter-librarian data support services that may incite cost reduction of operations while still broadening an international research mission of collaborating universities. Lastly, various forms of data curation may benefit from international collaboration, including such as educational data curation

DataStations: ubiquitous transient storage for mobile users

technical reportIn this paper, we describe DataStations, an architecture that provides ubiquitous transient storage to arbitrary mobile applications. Mobile users can utilize a nearby DataStation as a proxy cache for their remote home file servers, as a file server to meet transient storage needs, and as a platform to share data and collaborate with other users over the wide area. A user can roam among DataStations, creating, updating and sharing files via a native file interface using a uniform file name space throughout. Our architecture provides transparent migration of file ownership and responsibility among DataStations and a user?s home file server. This design not only ensures file permanence, but also allows DataStations to reclaim their resources autonomously, allowing the system to incrementally scale to a large number of DataStations and users. The unique aspects of our DataStation design are its decentralized but uniform name space, its locality-aware peer replication mechanism, and its highly flexible consistency framework that lets users select the appropriate consistency mechanism on a per-file replica basis. Our evaluation demonstrates that DataStations can support low-latency access to remote files as well as ad-hoc data sharing and collaboration by mobile users, without compromising consistency or data safety

Trustworthy device pairing for opportunistic device-to-device communications in mobile crowdsourcing systems

Mobile Crowdsourcing System is an emerging service paradigm base on numerous personal smart devices, where the Deviceto- Device communication among opportunistically encountered participating devices is an indispensable part of task allocation, file transmission and data collaboration. Considering that participating devices are privately held and opportunistically encountered, we design the Trustworthy Device Pairing (TDP) scheme that realizes user-transparent sharing secret key negotiation and reliable peer device determination for trustworthy spontaneous D2D transactions. TDP is demonstrated to be effective based on our proof-of-concept implementation, and a further evaluation on efficiency will be conducted

Secure and Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing and Collaboration in Mobile Healthcare Social Networks of Smart Cities

Mobile healthcare social networks (MHSN) integrated with connected medical sensors and cloud-based health data storage provide preventive and curative health services in smart cities. The fusion of social data together with real-time health data facilitates a novel paradigm of healthcare big data analysis. However, the collaboration of healthcare and social network service providers may pose a series of security and privacy issues. In this paper, we propose a secure health and social data sharing and collaboration scheme in MHSN. To preserve the data privacy, we realize secure and fine-grained health data and social data sharing with attribute-based encryption and identity-based broadcast encryption techniques, respectively, which allows patients to share their private personal data securely. In order to achieve enhanced data collaboration, we allow the healthcare analyzers to access both the reencrypted health data and the social data with authorization from the data owner based on proxy reencryption. Specifically, most of the health data encryption and decryption computations are outsourced from resource-constrained mobile devices to a health cloud, and the decryption of the healthcare analyzer incurs a low cost. The security and performance analysis results show the security and efficiency of our scheme