Computer-Supported Collaborative Production

This paper proposes the concept of collaborative production as a focus of concern within the general area of collaborative work. We position the concept with respect to McGrath's framework for small group dynamics and the more familiar collaboration processes of awareness, coordination, and communication (McGrath 1991). After reviewing research issues and computer-based support for these interacting aspects of collaboration, we turn to a discussion of implications for how to design improved support for collaborative production. We illustrate both the challenges of collaborative production and our design implications with a collaborative map-updating scenario drawn from the work domain of geographical information systems

Spatial contexts : an interactive environment for personal design

Thesis (M.S.V.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1986.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCHBibliography: leaves 133-140.by Jonathan Scott Linowes.M.S.V.S

Time tracking of different cropping patterns using Landsat images under different agricultural systems during 1990-2050 in Cold China

Rapid cropland reclamation is underway in Cold China in response to increases in food demand, while the lack analyses of time series cropping pattern mappings limits our understanding of the acute transformation process of cropland structure and associated environmental effects. The Cold China contains different agricultural systems (state and private farming), and such systems could lead to different cropping patterns. So far, such changes have not been revealed yet. Based on the Landsat images, this study tracked cropping information in five-year increments (1990-1995, 1995-2000, 2000-2005, 2005-2010, and 2010-2015) and predicted future patterns for the period of 2020-2050 under different agricultural systems using developed method for determining cropland patterns. The following results were obtained: The available time series of Landsat images in Cold China met the requirements for long-term cropping pattern studies, and the developed method exhibited high accuracy (over 91%) and obtained precise spatial information. A new satellite evidence was observed that cropping patterns significantly differed between the two farm types, with paddy field in state farming expanding at a faster rate (from 2.66 to 68.56%) than those in private farming (from 10.12 to 34.98%). More than 70% of paddy expansion was attributed to the transformation of upland crop in each period at the pixel level, which led to a greater loss of upland crop in state farming than private farming (9505.66 km(2) vs. 2840.29 km(2)) during 1990-2015. Rapid cropland reclamation is projected to stagnate in 2020, while paddy expansion will continue until 2040 primarily in private farming in Cold China. This study provides new evidence for different land use change pattern mechanisms between different agricultural systems, and the results have significant implications for understanding and guiding agricultural system development

Application of grounded theory to exploring multimedia design practices

This paper describes the application of Grounded Theory to an exploration of multimedia design practices. It discusses the opinions of multimedia developers, as elicited from interviews, on the selected design tasks and the processes employed in their completion. Our findings, which emerge from the analysis of the collected data, indicate that the currently available multimedia models do not address some of the important concerns of practitioners. We believe that closing the methodological gaps in these models would provide bettersupport for the multimedia development process.<br /

Application of Grounded Theory to Exploring Multimedia Design Practices

This paper describes the application of Grounded Theory to an exploration of multimedia\ud design practices. It discusses the opinions of multimedia developers, as elicited from\ud interviews, on the selected design tasks and the processes employed in their completion. Our\ud findings, which emerge from the analysis of the collected data, indicate that the currently\ud available multimedia models do not address some of the important concerns of practitioners.\ud We believe that closing the methodological gaps in these models would provide better\ud support for the multimedia development process

Visual interaction techniques for courseware production and presentation.

by Lam Shing Yung, Anton.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1991.Includes bibliographical references.Chapter I. --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1. --- Motivations for Presentation System --- p.2Chapter 1.2. --- Shortcomings of Traditional Method --- p.2Chapter 1.3. --- Computerized Courseware Production and Presentation System --- p.5Chapter 1.4. --- Hardware Advances --- p.7Chapter 1.5. --- "Windowed, Graphical Applications" --- p.9Chapter 1.6. --- Interaction Techniques --- p.10Chapter 1.7. --- Research Objectives --- p.12Chapter II. --- Existing Products and Related Research --- p.13Chapter 2.1. --- Existing Products --- p.13Chapter 2.1.1. --- PRESENT Slide Presentation System --- p.14Chapter 2.1.2. --- Harvard Graphics --- p.15Chapter 2.1.3. --- HyperCard --- p.15Chapter 2.1.4. --- Macromind Director --- p.16Chapter 2.1.5. --- Authorware Professional --- p.17Chapter 2.1.6. --- "PageMaker, Ventura and MacDraw" --- p.19Chapter 2.1.7. --- Summary --- p.20Chapter 2.2. --- Related Research --- p.20Chapter 2.2.1. --- Authoring Systems --- p.20Chapter 2.2.2. --- User Interface Management System (UIMS) --- p.23Chapter 2.2.3. --- Visual Programming --- p.24Chapter III. --- User's Model --- p.27Chapter 3.1. --- A Simple User's Model --- p.27Chapter 3.1.1. --- Object-0riented Presentation Material --- p.27Chapter 3.1.2. --- Frame -Based Presentation --- p.29Chapter 3.1.3. --- Presentation Styles --- p.29Chapter 3.2. --- Novice Users vs Experienced Users --- p.30Chapter IV. --- Design of the Courseware Production and Presentation System --- p.31Chapter 4.1. --- Overview --- p.31Chapter 4.2. --- Object Oriented Design --- p.31Chapter 4.3. --- Object Oriented Graphics --- p.31Chapter 4.3.1. --- Modification of Object --- p.32Chapter 4.3.2. --- Clipboard --- p.34Chapter 4.3.3. --- Stacking of Objects --- p.35Chapter 4.3.4. --- Group Together and Break Apart --- p.36Chapter 4.3.5. --- Hierarchy of Grouping --- p.38Chapter 4.3.6. --- Storage Requirements --- p.39Chapter 4.4. --- Operations --- p.39Chapter 4.4.1. --- Manipulative Operations --- p.39Chapter 4.4.2. --- Frame Control Operations --- p.39Chapter 4.4.3. --- Timer Operation --- p.40Chapter 4.5. --- Active-Object-Set Model --- p.40Chapter 4.5.1. --- Importance of Objects --- p.41Chapter 4.5.2. --- Active Object --- p.42Chapter 4.5.3. --- Active Set --- p.43Chapter 4.5.4. --- The Timer Event --- p.43Chapter 4.6. --- Properties of Visual Objects --- p.45Chapter 4.6.1. --- Physical Attributes --- p.45Chapter 4.6.1. --- Event-Handling Operations --- p.45Chapter 4.6.2. --- Private Status --- p.46Chapter 4.7. --- Object Class --- p.47Chapter 4.8. --- User-Defined Object Classes --- p.47Chapter 4.9. --- User-Defined Operations --- p.47Chapter V. --- Interaction Techniques for Defining New Object Classes and Operations --- p.49Chapter 5.1. --- Interaction Techniques --- p.49Chapter 5.2. --- Object Creation --- p.49Chapter 5.3. --- Operations --- p.51Chapter 5.3.1. --- Direct Manipulation --- p.51Chapter 5.3.2. --- Menu Selection --- p.51Chapter 5.3.3. --- Parameter Selection --- p.51Chapter 5.4. --- New Object Class Definition --- p.52Chapter 5.4.1. --- Definition through Drawing --- p.53Chapter 5.4.2. --- Creating New Object Instances of the New Object Classes --- p.54Chapter 5.5. --- New Operations Definition --- p.55Chapter 5.5.1. --- Specification of Parameter Type --- p.55Chapter 5.5.2. --- Selection and Sequencing of Primitive Operations …… --- p.57Chapter 5.5.3. --- Using the New Operations --- p.60Chapter 5.6. --- Binding of Operations to an Object --- p.61Chapter 5.7. --- Default Operations for User-Defined Classes --- p.63Chapter VI. --- Implementation Issues --- p.64Chapter 6.1. --- Operating Environment --- p.64Chapter 6.1.1. --- The User Interface --- p.64Chapter 6.1.2. --- The Operating System --- p.66Chapter 6.1.3. --- The Hardware Requirement --- p.66Chapter 6.1.4. --- The Final Choice --- p.67Chapter 6.2. --- Representation of Objects --- p.68Chapter 6.2.1. --- Basic Objects --- p.68Chapter 6.2.2. --- Group and User-Defined Objects --- p.69Chapter 6.2.3. --- Set of Active Objects --- p.70Chapter 6.3. --- Object-Oriented Graphics Management Subsystem --- p.71Chapter 6.4. --- Multiple Editing Window --- p.73Chapter 6.5. --- Clipboard --- p.73Chapter 6.6. --- Graphical Menu --- p.73Chapter 6.7. --- Font Management --- p.74Chapter 6.8. --- Mapping of the Active-Object-Set Model to the Implementation --- p.75Chapter 6.9. --- Representation of Operations --- p.76Chapter VII. --- Future Work and Conclusions --- p.79Chapter 7.1. --- Limitations --- p.79Chapter 7.1.1. --- Direct Manipulations --- p.79Chapter 7.1.2. --- Multiple Presentation Windows --- p.79Chapter 7.1.3. --- Editing of User-Defined Operations --- p.80Chapter 7.2. --- Future Work --- p.80Chapter 7.2.1. --- Maintaining Relationship Through Constraint Satisfaction --- p.80Chapter 7.2.2. --- Functions for System Status/Values Query --- p.82Chapter 7.2.3. --- "Private Status Flag, Pre-Conditions and Conditional Execution" --- p.82Chapter 7.2.4. --- Object Oriented Programming --- p.85Chapter 7.3. --- Other Related Application Areas --- p.86Chapter 7.3.1. --- Visual-Object Oriented Systems --- p.86Chapter 7.3.2. --- User Interface Management Systems --- p.89Chapter 7.4. --- Conclusions --- p.89References --- p.9

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

Pro-Design: Digital Media Pack for Professional Graphic Designers

The importance of developing a comprehensive digital design presence as well a as digital business strategy has become a necessity for graphic design practitioners. In this report I review how this could be achieved and document the development of a coherent digital presence that has a more inclusive approach to client/designer communication and that better suits the needs of a graphic designer in industry. This document provides a detailed overview of my research and development for this MA Project. It sets down the course of action and the directions that the project took and identifies the aims and objectives I hoped to fulfil during the development of the project. It documents the process that I followed to achieve this including research, analysis and development, realisation, presentation and reflection. It also provides a description of the projects deliverables and the relevant functionality and content

Augmented reality device for first response scenarios

A prototype of a wearable computer system is proposed and implemented using commercial off-shelf components. The system is designed to allow the user to access location-specific information about an environment, and to provide capability for user tracking. Areas of applicability include primarily first response scenarios, with possible applications in maintenance or construction of buildings and other structures. Necessary preparation of the target environment prior to system\u27s deployment is limited to noninvasive labeling using optical fiducial markers. The system relies on computational vision methods for registration of labels and user position. With the system the user has access to on-demand information relevant to a particular real-world location. Team collaboration is assisted by user tracking and real-time visualizations of team member positions within the environment. The user interface and display methods are inspired by Augmented Reality1 (AR) techniques, incorporating a video-see-through Head Mounted Display (HMD) and fingerbending sensor glove.*. 1Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real world and computer generated data. At present, most AR research is concerned with the use of live video imagery which is digitally processed and augmented by the addition of computer generated graphics. Advanced research includes the use of motion tracking data, fiducial marker recognition using machine vision, and the construction of controlled environments containing any number of sensors and actuators. (Source: Wikipedia) *This dissertation is a compound document (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation). The CD requires the following system requirements: Adobe Acrobat; Microsoft Office; Windows MediaPlayer or RealPlayer