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

Community mirrors for supporting corporate innovation and motivation

In this paper we are exploring the idea of applying community support concepts and ubiquitous user interfaces to supporting the motivation to innovate in corporate settings. Our special focus is on the early phase of the innovation process – the phase of idea generation and suggestion management. The key idea is to provide awareness for a company’s creative potential and appreciation for the idea creators in a corporate setting by displaying information from community platforms handling the suggestion management process on public shared displays (“Idea Mirrors”) in the office space

Idea Mirrors – Unterstützung von Innovation in Unternehmen durch Community-Awareness

In diesem Beitrag diskutieren wir die Idee, Konzepte aus den Bereichen der Community-Unterstützung und ubiquitären Benutzungsschnittstellen auf die Unterstützung von Innovation in Unternehmen anzuwenden. Unser Fokus liegt dabei auf der frühen Phase des Innovationsprozesses – der Ideengenerierung und des Vorschlagsmanagements. Kernidee unseres Ansatzes ist es dabei, Awareness über das kreative Potential des Unternehmens bereitzustellen und eingebrachte Ideen durch öffentliche Präsentation zu würdigen, indem sie auf großen Wandbildschirmen („Idea Mirrors“) im Bürobereich dargestellt werden

The User-Centered Nature of Awareness Creation in Computer-mediated Communication

In face-to-face contexts, information about the activities, context or emotions of others is typically available and often taken for granted. In computer-mediated communication (CMC) contexts, this awareness information is not readily available and thus needs to be actively signaled by users or technology or otherwise conveyed as byproduct of the ongoing interaction. We present a theory of the dynamic creation of awareness via computer-mediated communication illustrated by a metaphor of pools fed from streams of interaction. Pools of awareness are held within users and gradually fill via signals from others. Users need different pools to be fed and draw from the streams of interaction to feed their pools and reciprocally place information in the streams to feed the pools of others. In addition, pools drain and must be replenished when a new CMC encounter begins. Awareness is thus created actively or as byproduct of social communicative practice, but is not an instant product of technology. We formulate theoretical propositions and discuss implications of our proposed theory for CMC researchers and practitioners

Personalization platform for multimodal ubiquitous computing applications

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaWe currently live surrounded by a myriad of computing devices running multiple applications. In general, the user experience on each of those scenarios is not adapted to each user’s specific needs, without personalization and integration across scenarios. Moreover, developers usually do not have the right tools to handle that in a standard and generic way. As such, a personalization platform may provide those tools. This kind of platform should be readily available to be used by any developer. Therefore, it must be developed to be available over the Internet. With the advances in IT infrastructure, it is now possible to develop reliable and scalable services running on abstract and virtualized platforms. Those are some of the advantages of cloud computing, which offers a model of utility computing where customers are able to dynamically allocate the resources they need and are charged accordingly. This work focuses on the creation of a cloud-based personalization platform built on a previously developed generic user modeling framework. It provides user profiling and context-awareness tools to third-party developers. A public display-based application was also developed. It provides useful information to students, teachers and others in a university campus as they are detected by Bluetooth scanning. It uses the personalization platform as the basis to select the most relevant information in each situation, while a mobile application was developed to be used as an input mechanism. A user study was conducted to assess the usefulness of the application and to validate some design choices. The results were mostly positive

Uma infra-estrutura computacional para aumentar objectos reais com informação adicional

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaA Computação Ubíqua tem como objectivo principal a construção de sistemas computacionais que suportem e facilitem o quotidiano dos utilizadores, mas sendo o menos intrusivos possível. Idealmente, estes nem se aperceberiam desse seu papel, pois toda a estrutura do sistema estaria de tal forma integrada no ambiente que se tornaria invisível, fazendo desaparecer a consciência de que se está perante um sistema computacional. Nos últimos anos, tem-se intensifi cado a investigação nesta área e são muitos os avanços tecnológicos, mas o cenário actual ainda se encontra longe de um quotidiano preenchido por sistemas ubíquos invisíveis. Esta dissertação segue uma perspectiva que defende uma aproximação prudente e iterativa à visão de Computação Ubíqua. Neste âmbito, é estudada e apresentada uma proposta de arquitectura e sistema, baseada em tecnologias reconhecidas, com um objectivo aplicacional restrito. Este sistema aumenta os objectos físicos presentes num ambiente através da apresentação de informação multimédia adicional. A informação que aumenta um objecto é contextual,baseando-se não só no objecto, mas também na sua localização específica, no espaço e no per l dos utilizadores. Foi desenhada uma arquitectura genérica para a implementação de infra-estruturas computacionais deste tipo em qualquer espaço físico. Esta tem em consideraração a distribuição do sistema pelas várias entidades presentes no ambiente, que são utilizadores, dispositivos e objectos. A apresentação da informação é feita onde e quando é necessária, sendo o mais discreta possível,e com interacção passiva. Numa abordagem complementar, permite-se uma interacção activa, desde que solicitada pelo utilizador. Foram desenvolvidos dois protótipos da infra-estrutura, cada um com base numa tecnologia madura para detecção e comunicação - RFID e Bluetooth. Estes protótipos permitiram que estas tecnologias fossem testadas, servindo também como prova de viabilidade da infra-estrutura

Supporting Community Awareness with Public Shared Displays

Community support is currently gaining more and more importance in different areas where communication is important, e.g. in knowledge management. One important issue in community support is making the community and the activity of its members visible to the members – the provision of community awareness. This paper addresses the usage of non-desktop user interfaces, namely public shared displays, as an additional interface for community support applications to provide community awareness. By displaying information from within the community such “Community Mirrors ” can help insiders and outsiders getting an understanding of the community, and thereby make more efficient communication possible. We present an overview of how such devices can be used for community support, and briefly describe three applications we have designed and implemented