Coordination approaches and systems - part I : a strategic perspective

This is the first part of a two-part paper presenting a fundamental review and summary of research of design coordination and cooperation technologies. The theme of this review is aimed at the research conducted within the decision management aspect of design coordination. The focus is therefore on the strategies involved in making decisions and how these strategies are used to satisfy design requirements. The paper reviews research within collaborative and coordinated design, project and workflow management, and, task and organization models. The research reviewed has attempted to identify fundamental coordination mechanisms from different domains, however it is concluded that domain independent mechanisms need to be augmented with domain specific mechanisms to facilitate coordination. Part II is a review of design coordination from an operational perspective

A tutorial task and tertiary courseware model for collaborative learning communities

RAED provides a computerised infrastructure to support the development and administration of Vicarious Learning in collaborative learning communities spread across multiple universities and workplaces. The system is based on the OASIS middleware for Role-based Access Control. This paper describes the origins of the model and the approach to implementation and outlines some of its benefits to collaborative teachers and learners

Expert system decision support for low-cost launch vehicle operations

Progress in assessing the feasibility, benefits, and risks associated with AI expert systems applied to low cost expendable launch vehicle systems is described. Part one identified potential application areas in vehicle operations and on-board functions, assessed measures of cost benefit, and identified key technologies to aid in the implementation of decision support systems in this environment. Part two of the program began the development of prototypes to demonstrate real-time vehicle checkout with controller and diagnostic/analysis intelligent systems and to gather true measures of cost savings vs. conventional software, verification and validation requirements, and maintainability improvement. The main objective of the expert advanced development projects was to provide a robust intelligent system for control/analysis that must be performed within a specified real-time window in order to meet the demands of the given application. The efforts to develop the two prototypes are described. Prime emphasis was on a controller expert system to show real-time performance in a cryogenic propellant loading application and safety validation implementation of this system experimentally, using commercial-off-the-shelf software tools and object oriented programming techniques. This smart ground support equipment prototype is based in C with imbedded expert system rules written in the CLIPS protocol. The relational database, ORACLE, provides non-real-time data support. The second demonstration develops the vehicle/ground intelligent automation concept, from phase one, to show cooperation between multiple expert systems. This automated test conductor (ATC) prototype utilizes a knowledge-bus approach for intelligent information processing by use of virtual sensors and blackboards to solve complex problems. It incorporates distributed processing of real-time data and object-oriented techniques for command, configuration control, and auto-code generation

Teacher Education Preparation Assessment System and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education Accreditation

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the assessment systems of teacher preparation programs have changed since the new NCATE Standards were implemented in 2004, what methods of data collections are being used, and to measure coordinators\u27 perceptions of the assessment systems. An electronic survey was developed by the researcher based upon a review of related literature, the researcher\u27s personal experience, and years of reviewing data collection software. An invitation to the survey was emailed to 631 NCATE Coordinators or equivalent as identified from their institution\u27s website with 221 participants completing the survey for a return rate of 35%. Descriptive statistics were used to report the data. Results showed that institutions were collecting more data about the candidate\u27s preparation than was collected a decade ago most notably in the area of dispositions and that institutions are using a combination of commercial software packages to help in the data collection process. While some respondents reported dissatisfaction about their software, others reported that the collection process was adequately collecting data for them. Many believed that they would not be collecting the amount of data if it had not been for the NCATE accreditation standards requirements while others wished that they had a dedicated person at their institution to manage and analyze the data for them

Issues in digital preservation: towards a new research agenda

Digital Preservation has evolved into a specialized, interdisciplinary research discipline of its own, seeing significant increases in terms of research capacity, results, but also challenges. However, with this specialization and subsequent formation of a dedicated subgroup of researchers active in this field, limitations of the challenges addressed can be observed. Digital preservation research may seem to react to problems arising, fixing problems that exist now, rather than proactively researching new solutions that may be applicable only after a few years of maturing. Recognising the benefits of bringing together researchers and practitioners with various professional backgrounds related to digital preservation, a seminar was organized in Schloss Dagstuhl, at the Leibniz Center for Informatics (18-23 July 2010), with the aim of addressing the current digital preservation challenges, with a specific focus on the automation aspects in this field. The main goal of the seminar was to outline some research challenges in digital preservation, providing a number of "research questions" that could be immediately tackled, e.g. in Doctoral Thesis. The seminar intended also to highlight the need for the digital preservation community to reach out to IT research and other research communities outside the immediate digital preservation domain, in order to jointly develop solutions

A Literature Survey of Cooperative Caching in Content Distribution Networks

Content distribution networks (CDNs) which serve to deliver web objects (e.g., documents, applications, music and video, etc.) have seen tremendous growth since its emergence. To minimize the retrieving delay experienced by a user with a request for a web object, caching strategies are often applied - contents are replicated at edges of the network which is closer to the user such that the network distance between the user and the object is reduced. In this literature survey, evolution of caching is studied. A recent research paper [15] in the field of large-scale caching for CDN was chosen to be the anchor paper which serves as a guide to the topic. Research studies after and relevant to the anchor paper are also analyzed to better evaluate the statements and results of the anchor paper and more importantly, to obtain an unbiased view of the large scale collaborate caching systems as a whole.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Using Shared Workspaces in Higher Education

We evaluate the use of BSCW shared workspaces in higher education by means of a comparison of seven courses in which this environment was used. We identify a number of different functions for which the BSCW environment has been used and discuss the relative success of these functions across the cases. In addition, we evaluate the cases with the 4E model of Collis et al. (2000) which predicts the chances of acceptance of ICT in an educational setting. Effectiveness for the given task appears to be a prime success factor for using ICT. But an effective tool may fail due to other factors like ease of use and organisational, socialcultural or technological obstacles. The particular strength of a shared workspace, for which BSCW is most effective and efficient, is providing a repository for objects of collaborative work. Other types of usage showed mixed results. In the future we expect that learning takes place in an integrated, open ICT environment in which different kinds of tools are available for different purposes and users can switch between tools as appropriate. We could observe this in several of the case studies, where non-use of BSCW did not mean that a particular task was not performed, but, on the contrary, a more efficient solution for the same function was available. Shared workspaces have proven to be highly useful, but it seems advisable that their purpose be limited to what they were originally designed for

A Simple Cooperative Diversity Method Based on Network Path Selection

Cooperative diversity has been recently proposed as a way to form virtual antenna arrays that provide dramatic gains in slow fading wireless environments. However most of the proposed solutions require distributed space-time coding algorithms, the careful design of which is left for future investigation if there is more than one cooperative relay. We propose a novel scheme, that alleviates these problems and provides diversity gains on the order of the number of relays in the network. Our scheme first selects the best relay from a set of M available relays and then uses this best relay for cooperation between the source and the destination. We develop and analyze a distributed method to select the best relay that requires no topology information and is based on local measurements of the instantaneous channel conditions. This method also requires no explicit communication among the relays. The success (or failure) to select the best available path depends on the statistics of the wireless channel, and a methodology to evaluate performance for any kind of wireless channel statistics, is provided. Information theoretic analysis of outage probability shows that our scheme achieves the same diversity-multiplexing tradeoff as achieved by more complex protocols, where coordination and distributed space-time coding for M nodes is required, such as those proposed in [7]. The simplicity of the technique, allows for immediate implementation in existing radio hardware and its adoption could provide for improved flexibility, reliability and efficiency in future 4G wireless systems.Comment: To appear, IEEE JSAC, special issue on 4

Information technology networked system for student mobility support

Purpose - This paper presents an IT system - Student Connectivity Module (SCM) - designed for support of administration of student exchange between universities in different countries, developed under the EU 7th Framework Programme. This paper aims to share the acquired knowledge on existing difficulties in mobility management, propose solutions to those problems, and present results of system validation using its prototype deployed at two universities. Design/methodology/approach - Prior to the system design, the needs, plans and expectations concerning the academic IT services were surveyed among 100 universities. On this basis, in close with prospective system users, an original peer-to-peer system was developed using top-down model-driven and agile software development techniques. Findings - The barriers to effective interoperation of academic information systems were revealed: 1) diversity and heterogeneity of campus IT solutions, 2) differences in patterns of international student mobility flow, 3) diversity in national personal data protection policies, 4) lack of standards for e-data exchange. The SCM system overcomes these problems by adopting platform-independent IT solutions, Web-Services, a network of trusted authority servers, and a novel “quasi-standard” solution for e-data exchange, with the use of home university campus cards to access facilities at host institutions. Originality - The management of foreign student exchange is a complicated process. It involves students, faculty, administrative staff and external institutions. To our knowledge, there is no other comprehensive networked IT system available to facilitate administration of student mobility, make it better controlled, less laborious and faster, in a secure way. Our IT solution contributes to overcoming the current barriers to academic mobility within Europe and elsewhere