Information-rich user embodiment in groupware

Embodiments are virtual personifications of the user in real-time distributed groupware. Many embodiments in groupware are simple abstract 2D representations such as avatars and telepointers. Although current user embodiment techniques can reveal information related to position and orientation, they show far less than what is available in a face-to-face situation, and as a result, collaboration can become more difficult. The problem addressed in this research is that it is difficult for groupware users to recognize and characterize other participants using only their embodiments. The solution explored in this thesis is to provide more information about groupware users by enriching their embodiment. This scheme encodes state and context variables as visual augmentations on the embodiment. Providing information about characteristics such as skill, expertise, and experience can be valuable for collaboration; increasing the information in visual embodiments makes it easier and more natural for collaborators to recognize and characterize others, and thus coordinate activity, simplify communication, and find collaborators. Rich embodiments were tested in three separate experiments. The first experiment showed that users are able to recall a large number of variables displayed on embodiments, and are able to accurately determine the values of those variables. The second study showed that rich embodiments are useful in terms of collaboration and interaction in an actual groupware context – a multiplayer game. The final study further examined information-rich embodiment in a shared drawing task, and further revealed the potential of increasing awareness using embodiment

Co-browsing the Greenstone digital library collection

Context: Social interaction is an important aspect of a successful web page. Social network sites attract many people worldwide. The social interaction aspect is missing from digital libraries, including the Greenstone Digital Library. Objectives: This study investigates how two distant users exchange information while in front of the computer and browsing the same Greenstone Digital library collection, in real time, and identifies the features that support their needs. Methods: To answer the research questions, an observation methodology is applied to gain more insight into users’ information-seeking behaviour for an online DL. Two recording elements were used to gather data from a sample of eight pairs of university students (n=16). The two elements were video camera (with audio) and screen capture. Further, a questionnaire was used to collect data about the workload during the session. Results: The data obtained was analysed using conversation and content analysis methods. The findings of this user study related to the metadata presentation, referencing information and search box activities. A Co-browsing GDL system is proposed based on the requirements derived from findings from the user study and also the related works. Evaluation: A usability test is used to evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of the proposed system. Think aloud and questionnaire methods are used to gather the data of this usability test. Results: The result of this study “debug” the proposed Co-browsing GDL system and explore issues related to communication and private works, with it having become apparent through the study that improvements can be made to some parts of the system presentation. Conclusions: The findings of the thesis research have been used to provide recommendations for future work to develop and implement a Co-browsing Greenstone digital library (GDL) system

Can We Work Together?

People have a versatility to adapt to various situations in order to communicate with each other regardless of a person's disability. We research separate computer interfaces to support remote synchronous collaboration in two situations. First, a deaf person collaborating with a hearing person uses a shared workspace with video conferencing, such as the Facetop system. Second, a blind person collaborating with a sighted person uses our loosely coupled custom shared workspace called Deep View. The design features of the respective interfaces accommodate the disability of a deaf person or a blind person and enable communication with a person without a disability. The interfaces expand the ways in which people with disabilities participate in a collaborative task to a level of detail not possible without our interfaces. The design features of our user interfaces provide alternative channels for the collaborators with disabilities to communicate ideas or coordinate actions that collaborators without disabilities would otherwise do verbally or visually. We evaluate the interfaces through three user studies where collaborators complete full fledged tasks that require managing all aspects of communication to complete the task. Throughout the research we collaborated with members of the Deaf community and members of the blind community. We incorporated the feedback from members of these communities into the implementation of our interfaces. The members participated in our user studies to evaluate the interfaces

A component-based collaboration infrastructure

Groupware applications allow geographically distributed users to collaborate on shared tasks. However, it is widely recognized that groupware applications are expensive to build due to coordination services and group dynamics, neither of which is present in single-user applications. Previous collaboration transparency systems reuse existing single-user applications as a whole for collaborative work, often at the price of inflexible coordination. Previous collaboration awareness systems, on the other hand, provide reusable coordination services and multi-user widgets, but often with two weaknesses: (1) the multi-user widgets provided are special-purpose and limited in number, while no guidelines are provided for developing multi-user interface components in general; and (2) they often fail to reach the desired level of flexibility in coordination by tightly binding shared data and coordination services. In this dissertation, we propose a component-based approach to developing group- ware applications that addresses the above two problems. To address the first prob- lem, we propose a shared component model for modeling data and graphic user inter- face(GUI) components of groupware applications. As a result, the myriad of existing single-user components can be re-purposed as shared GUI or data components. An adaptation tool is developed to assist the adaptation process. To address the second problem, we propose a coordination service framework which systematically model the interaction between user, data, and coordination protocols. Due to the clean separation of data and control and the capability to dynamically "glue" them together, the framework provides reusable services such as data distribution, persistence, and adaptable consistency control. The association between data and coordination services can be dynamically changed at runtime. An Evolvable and eXtensible Environment for Collaboration (EXEC) is built to evaluate the proposed approach. In our experiments, we demonstrate two benefits of our approach: (1) a group of common groupware features adapted from existing single- user components are plugged in to extend the functionalities of the environment itself; and (2)coordination services can be dynamically attached to and detached from these shared components at different granules to support evolving collaboration needs

Avoiding overload in multiuser online applications

One way to strengthen the bond between popular applications and their online user communities is to integrate the applications with their communities, so users are able to observe and communicate with other users. The result of this integration is a Multiuser Online Application (MOA). The problem studied in this thesis is that MOA users and systems will be overloaded with information generated by large communities and complex applications. The solution investigated was to filter the amount of information delivered to users while attempting to preserve the benefits of dwelling in a MOA environment. This strategy was evaluated according to the amount of information it was capable of reducing and the effects as seen by MOA users. It was found that filtering could be used to substantially reduce the information exchanged by users while still providing users with the benefits of integrating application and community

This is it ! : Indicating and looking in collaborative work at distance

Little is known of the interplay between deixis and eye movements in remote collaboration. This paper presents quantitative results from an experiment where participant pairs had to collaborate at a distance using chat tools that differed in the way messages could be enriched with spatial information from the map in the shared workspace. We studied how the availability of what we defined as an Explicit Referencing mechanism (ER) affected the coordination of the eye movements of the participants. The manipulation of the availability of ER did not produce any significant difference on the gaze coupling. However, we found a primary relation between the pairs recurrence of eye movements and their task performance. Implications for design are discussed

Consistency Algorithms and Protocols for Distributed Interactive Applications

The Internet has a major impact not only on how people retrieve information but also on how they communicate. Distributed interactive applications support the communication and collaboration of people through the sharing and manipulation of rich multimedia content via the Internet. Aside from shared text editors, meeting support systems, and distributed virtual environments, shared whiteboards are a prominent example of distributed interactive applications. They allow the presentation and joint editing of documents in video conferencing scenarios. The design of such a shared whiteboard application, the multimedia lecture board (mlb), is a main contribution of this thesis. Like many other distributed interactive applications, the mlb has a replicated architecture where each user runs an instance of the application. This has the distinct advantage that the application can be deployed in a lightweight fashion, without relying on a supporting server infrastructure. But at the same time, this peer-to-peer architecture raises a number of challenging problems: First, application data needs to be distributed among all instances. For this purpose, we present the network protocol RTP/I for the standardized communication of distributed interactive applications, and a novel application-level multicast protocol that realizes efficient group communication while taking application-level knowledge into account. Second, consistency control mechanisms are required to keep the replicated application data synchronized. We present the consistency control algorithms “local lag”, “Timewarp”, and “state request”, show how they can be combined, and discuss how to provide visual feedback so that the session members are able to handle conflicting actions. Finally, late-joining participants need to be initialized with the current application state before they are able to participate in a collaborative session. We propose a novel late-join algorithm, which is both flexible and scalable. All algorithms and protocols presented in this dissertation solve the aforementioned problems in a generic way. We demonstrate how they can be employed for the mlb as well as for other distributed interactive applications

An analysis framework for CSCW systems

Software toolkits are under development to help construct applications that support group-working. Toolkit developers adopt different approaches to group-work support in order to tackle different issues and a toolkit is commonly characterised by the approach adopted. It is difficult to compare toolkits because of this lack of apparent commonality and it is difficult to decide which toolkits meet specific application requirements. [Continues.

Annotations of maps in collaborative work at a distance

This thesis inquires how map annotations can be used to sustain remote collaboration. Maps condense the interplay of space and communication, solving linguistic references by linking conversational content to the actual places to which it refers. This is a mechanism people are accustomed to. When we are face-to-face, we can point to things around us. However, at a distance, we need to recreate a context that can help disambiguate what we mean. A map can help recreate this context. However other technological solutions are required to allow deictic gestures over a shared map when collaborators are not co-located. This mechanism is here termed Explicit Referencing. Several systems that allow sharing maps annotations are reviewed critically. A taxonomy is then proposed to compare their features. Two filed experiments were conducted to investigate the production of collaborative annotations of maps with mobile devices, looking for the reasons why people might want to produce these notes and how they might do so. Both studies led to very disappointing results. The reasons for this failure are attributed to the lack of a critical mass of users (social network), the lack of useful content, and limited social awareness. More importantly, the study identified a compelling effect of the way messages were organized in the tested application, which caused participants to refrain from engaging in content-driven explorations and synchronous discussions. This last qualitative observation was refined in a controlled experiment where remote participants had to solve a problem collaboratively, using chat tools that differed in the way a user could relate an utterance to a shared map. Results indicated that team performance is improved by the Explicit Referencing mechanisms. However, when this is implemented in a way that is detrimental to the linearity of the conversation, resulting in the visual dispersion or scattering of messages, its use has negative consequences for collaborative work at a distance. Additionally, an analysis of the eye movements of the participants over the map helped to ascertain the interplay of deixis and gaze in collaboration. A primary relation was found between the pair's recurrence of eye movements and their task performance. Finally, this thesis presents an algorithm that detects misunderstandings in collaborative work at a distance. It analyses the movements of collaborators' eyes over the shared map, their utterances containing references to this workspace, and the availability of "remote" deictic gestures. The algorithm associates the distance between the gazes of the emitter and gazes of the receiver of a message with the probability that the recipient did not understand the message

Towards Collaborative Scientific Workflow Management System

The big data explosion phenomenon has impacted several domains, starting from research areas to divergent of business models in recent years. As this intensive amount of data opens up the possibilities of several interesting knowledge discoveries, over the past few years divergent of research domains have undergone the shift of trend towards analyzing those massive amount data. Scientific Workflow Management System (SWfMS) has gained much popularity in recent years in accelerating those data-intensive analyses, visualization, and discoveries of important information. Data-intensive tasks are often significantly time-consuming and complex in nature and hence SWfMSs are designed to efficiently support the specification, modification, execution, failure handling, and monitoring of the tasks in a scientific workflow. As far as the complexity, dimension, and volume of data are concerned, their effective analysis or management often become challenging for an individual and requires collaboration of multiple scientists instead. Hence, the notion of 'Collaborative SWfMS' was coined - which gained significant interest among researchers in recent years as none of the existing SWfMSs directly support real-time collaboration among scientists. In terms of collaborative SWfMSs, consistency management in the face of conflicting concurrent operations of the collaborators is a major challenge for its highly interconnected document structure among the computational modules - where any minor change in a part of the workflow can highly impact the other part of the collaborative workflow for the datalink relation among them. In addition to the consistency management, studies show several other challenges that need to be addressed towards a successful design of collaborative SWfMSs, such as sub-workflow composition and execution by different sub-groups, relationship between scientific workflows and collaboration models, sub-workflow monitoring, seamless integration and access control of the workflow components among collaborators and so on. In this thesis, we propose a locking scheme to facilitate consistency management in collaborative SWfMSs. The proposed method works by locking workflow components at a granular attribute level in addition to supporting locks on a targeted part of the collaborative workflow. We conducted several experiments to analyze the performance of the proposed method in comparison to related existing methods. Our studies show that the proposed method can reduce the average waiting time of a collaborator by up to 36% while increasing the average workflow update rate by up to 15% in comparison to existing descendent modular level locking techniques for collaborative SWfMSs. We also propose a role-based access control technique for the management of collaborative SWfMSs. We leverage the Collaborative Interactive Application Methodology (CIAM) for the investigation of role-based access control in the context of collaborative SWfMSs. We present our proposed method with a use-case of Plant Phenotyping and Genotyping research domain. Recent study shows that the collaborative SWfMSs often different sets of opportunities and challenges. From our investigations on existing research works towards collaborative SWfMSs and findings of our prior two studies, we propose an architecture of collaborative SWfMSs. We propose - SciWorCS - a Collaborative Scientific Workflow Management System as a proof of concept of the proposed architecture; which is the first of its kind to the best of our knowledge. We present several real-world use-cases of scientific workflows using SciWorCS. Finally, we conduct several user studies using SciWorCS comprising different real-world scientific workflows (i.e., from myExperiment) to understand the user behavior and styles of work in the context of collaborative SWfMSs. In addition to evaluating SciWorCS, the user studies reveal several interesting facts which can significantly contribute in the research domain, as none of the existing methods considered such empirical studies, and rather relied only on computer generated simulated studies for evaluation