Mobile support in CSCW applications and groupware development frameworks

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is an established subset of the field of Human Computer Interaction that deals with the how people use computing technology to enhance group interaction and collaboration. Mobile CSCW has emerged as a result of the progression from personal desktop computing to the mobile device platforms that are ubiquitous today. CSCW aims to not only connect people and facilitate communication through using computers; it aims to provide conceptual models coupled with technology to manage, mediate, and assist collaborative processes. Mobile CSCW research looks to fulfil these aims through the adoption of mobile technology and consideration for the mobile user. Facilitating collaboration using mobile devices brings new challenges. Some of these challenges are inherent to the nature of the device hardware, while others focus on the understanding of how to engineer software to maximize effectiveness for the end-users. This paper reviews seminal and state-of-the-art cooperative software applications and development frameworks, and their support for mobile devices

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Experiential Role of Artefacts in Cooperative Design

The role of material artefacts in supporting distributed and co-located work practices has been well acknowledged within the HCI and CSCW research. In this paper, we show that in addition to their ecological, coordinative and organizational support, artefacts also play an ‘experiential’ role. In this case, artefacts not only improve efficiency or have a purely functional role (e.g. allowing people to complete tasks quickly), but the presence and manifestations of these artefacts bring quality and richness to people’s performance and help in making better sense of their everyday lives. In a domain like industrial design, such artefacts play an important role for supporting creativity and innovation. Based on our prolonged ethnographic fieldwork on understanding cooperative design practices of industrial design students and researchers, we describe several experiential practices that are supported by mundane artefacts like sketches, drawings, physical models and explorative prototypes – used and developed in designers’ everyday work. Our main intention to carry out this kind of research is to develop technologies to support designers’ everyday practices. We believe that with the emergence of ubiquitous computing, there is a growing need to focus on personal, emotional and social side of people’s everyday experiences. By focusing on the experiential practices of designers, we can provide a holistic view in the design of new interactive technologies

uC: Ubiquitous Collaboration Platform for Multimodal Team Interaction Support

A human-centered computing platform that improves teamwork and transforms the “human- computer interaction experience” for distributed teams is presented. This Ubiquitous Collaboration, or uC (“you see”), platform\u27s objective is to transform distributed teamwork (i.e., work occurring when teams of workers and learners are geographically dispersed and often interacting at different times). It achieves this goal through a multimodal team interaction interface realized through a reconfigurable open architecture. The approach taken is to integrate: (1) an intuitive speech- and video-centric multi-modal interface to augment more conventional methods (e.g., mouse, stylus and touch), (2) an open and reconfigurable architecture supporting information gathering, and (3) a machine intelligent approach to analysis and management of heterogeneous live and stored sensor data to support collaboration. The system will transform how teams of people interact with computers by drawing on both the virtual and physical environment

Coalitions of things: supporting ISR tasks via Internet of Things approaches

In the wake of rapid maturing of Internet of Things (IoT) approaches and technologies in the commercial sector, the IoT is increasingly seen as a key ‘disruptive’ technology in military environments. Future operational environments are expected to be characterized by a lower proportion of human participants and a higher proportion of autonomous and semi-autonomous devices. This view is reflected in both US ‘third offset’ and UK ‘information age’ thinking and is likely to have a profound effect on how multinational coalition operations are conducted in the future. Much of the initial consideration of IoT adoption in the military domain has rightly focused on security concerns, reflecting similar cautions in the early era of electronic commerce. As IoT approaches mature, this initial technical focus is likely to shift to considerations of interactivity and policy. In this paper, rather than considering the broader range of IoT applications in the military context, we focus on roles for IoT concepts and devices in future intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) tasks, drawing on experience in sensor-mission resourcing and human-computer collaboration (HCC) for ISR. We highlight the importance of low training overheads in the adoption of IoT approaches, and the need to balance proactivity and interactivity (push vs pull modes). As with sensing systems over the last decade, we emphasize that, to be valuable in ISR tasks, IoT devices will need a degree of mission-awareness in addition to an ability to self-manage their limited resources (power, memory, bandwidth, computation, etc). In coalition operations, the management and potential sharing of IoT devices and systems among partners (e.g., in cross-coalition tactical-edge ISR teams) becomes a key issue due heterogeneous factors such as language, policy, procedure and doctrine. Finally, we briefly outline a platform that we have developed in order to experiment with human-IoT teaming on ISR tasks, in both physical and virtual settings

A comparison of processing techniques for producing prototype injection moulding inserts.

This project involves the investigation of processing techniques for producing low-cost moulding inserts used in the particulate injection moulding (PIM) process. Prototype moulds were made from both additive and subtractive processes as well as a combination of the two. The general motivation for this was to reduce the entry cost of users when considering PIM. PIM cavity inserts were first made by conventional machining from a polymer block using the pocket NC desktop mill. PIM cavity inserts were also made by fused filament deposition modelling using the Tiertime UP plus 3D printer. The injection moulding trials manifested in surface finish and part removal defects. The feedstock was a titanium metal blend which is brittle in comparison to commodity polymers. That in combination with the mesoscale features, small cross-sections and complex geometries were considered the main problems. For both processing methods, fixes were identified and made to test the theory. These consisted of a blended approach that saw a combination of both the additive and subtractive processes being used. The parts produced from the three processing methods are investigated and their respective merits and issues are discussed

A Context-aware and Intelligent Framework for the Secure Mission Critical Systems

Recent technological advancements in pervasive systems have shown the poten-tial to address challenges in the military domain. Research developments in mili-tary-based mission-critical systems have refined a lot as in autopilot, sensing true target behavior, battle damage conditions, acquiring and manipulating command control information. However, the application of pervasive systems in the military domain is still evolving. In this paper, an intelligent framework has been pro-posed for mission-critical systems to incorporate advanced heterogeneous com-munication protocols; service-oriented layered structure and context-aware infor-mation manipulation. The proposed framework addresses the limitation of “time-space” constraints in Mission-critical systems that have been improved signifi-cantly. This improvement is courtesy to enhancing situation-aware tactical capa-bilities such as localization, decision significance, strategic span, strategic inten-tions, resource coordination and profiling concerning the situation. A comprehen-sive use case model has been presented for a typical battle-field scenario followed by a comparison of the proposed framework with existing techniques. It is evi-dent from experiments and analyses that the proposed framework provides more effective and seamless interaction with contextual resources to improve tactical capabilities. This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: A Context-aware and Intelligent Framework for the Secure Mission Critical Systems, which has been published in final form in Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Version

Reducing risk in pre-production investigations through undergraduate engineering projects.

This poster is the culmination of final year Bachelor of Engineering Technology (B.Eng.Tech) student projects in 2017 and 2018. The B.Eng.Tech is a level seven qualification that aligns with the Sydney accord for a three-year engineering degree and hence is internationally benchmarked. The enabling mechanism of these projects is the industry connectivity that creates real-world projects and highlights the benefits of the investigation of process at the technologist level. The methodologies we use are basic and transparent, with enough depth of technical knowledge to ensure the industry partners gain from the collaboration process. The process we use minimizes the disconnect between the student and the industry supervisor while maintaining the academic freedom of the student and the commercial sensitivities of the supervisor. The general motivation for this approach is the reduction of the entry cost of the industry to enable consideration of new technologies and thereby reducing risk to core business and shareholder profits. The poster presents several images and interpretive dialogue to explain the positive and negative aspects of the student process

Combining software engineering and design thinking practices in the ideation process of augmented digital experiences

Designing augmented and tangible experiences that intertwine human practices and expectations, interaction spaces and complex digital artifacts is a complex and multifaceted task that relies upon iterative and multidisciplinary ideation processes. Design thinking techniques have been traditionally used in ideation of such digital artifacts. In this paper, we posit that integrating some software engineering practices can improve ideation by providing a structure to the process and helping to build a shared and permanently documented design rationale. It is not a matter of software engineering versus design thinking but a question of developing a holistic understanding of technological development where discipline and creativity, rationality and emotions and quality centered and people centered coexist. Based on this assumption, we conceived a software tool called CoDICE that offers a virtual co-design space where augmented digital experiences are documented and analyzed in a shared and distributed way. The paper discusses how CoDICE contributes to alleviate some problems of co-design events including the need to support multiple co-design spaces, make explicit the co-design process and its goals, support documentation, justify design decisions, explore multiple ideas and generate a shared representation of the outcomes. Two scenarios are used to illustrate the tool utility: short-term co-design workshops in which the tool enabled multidisciplinary teams of novice designers to explore and structure their ideas and a long-term co-design project where the tool facilitated traceability, documentation, the reuse of design components and the shared elaboration of the design rationale and evolution of the deployed technologies.meSch project European Commission FP7 (600851

Designing Decision and Collaboration Support Technology for Operators in Multi-UAV Operations Teams

Effective team collaboration and timely decision-making significantly influence the outcome of time-sensitive military operations. The increasing complexity introduced by the recent move towards network centric operations (NCO) in U.S. military operations provides additional challenges for efficient decision-making. Future operations will include co-located and distributed teams composed of operators from difference services, often at different global locations. Military operations which require extremely quick decisions, such as operations dealing with time-sensitive targets (TST) like improvised explosive devices (IEDs), are particularly challenging in NCO teaming environments. Operators in TST environments not only have to manage overwhelming amounts of target-related information, but also have the overhead of communicating and coordinating with co-located and distributed team members. Given the increasing trend for modern hostile forces to employ unconventional weapons such as IEDs and suicide bombs, the success of TST operations are becoming critical to current and future military operations. Providing TST teams with effective tools for communicating and coordinating their efforts is key to enabling their success.Prepared For Boeing, Phantom Work