Technology enhanced interaction framework

This paper focuses on the development of a general interaction framework to help design technology to support communication between people and improve interactions between people, technology and objects, particularly in complex situations. A review of existing interaction frameworks shows that none of them help technology designers and developers to consider all of the possible interactions that occur at the same time and in the same place. The main and sub-components of the framework are described and explained and examples are given for each type of interaction. Work is now in progress to provide designers with an easy to use tool that helps them apply the framework to create technology solutions to complex communication and interaction problems and situations

Two Case Studies of Subsystem Design for General-Purpose CSCW Software Architectures

This paper discusses subsystem design guidelines for the software architecture of general-purpose computer supported cooperative work systems, i.e., systems that are designed to be applicable in various application areas requiring explicit collaboration support. In our opinion, guidelines for subsystem level design are rarely given most guidelines currently given apply to the programming language level. We extract guidelines from a case study of the redesign and extension of an advanced commercial workflow management system and place them into the context of existing software engineering research. The guidelines are then validated against the design decisions made in the construction of a widely used web-based groupware system. Our approach is based on the well-known distinction between essential (logical) and physical architectures. We show how essential architecture design can be based on a direct mapping of abstract functional concepts as found in general-purpose systems to modules in the essential architecture. The essential architecture is next mapped to a physical architecture by applying software clustering and replication to achieve the required distribution and performance characteristics

Towards a Novel Cooperative Logistics Information System Framework

Supply Chains and Logistics have a growing importance in global economy. Supply Chain Information Systems over the world are heterogeneous and each one can both produce and receive massive amounts of structured and unstructured data in real-time, which are usually generated by information systems, connected objects or manually by humans. This heterogeneity is due to Logistics Information Systems components and processes that are developed by different modelling methods and running on many platforms; hence, decision making process is difficult in such multi-actor environment. In this paper we identify some current challenges and integration issues between separately designed Logistics Information Systems (LIS), and we propose a Distributed Cooperative Logistics Platform (DCLP) framework based on NoSQL, which facilitates real-time cooperation between stakeholders and improves decision making process in a multi-actor environment. We included also a case study of Hospital Supply Chain (HSC), and a brief discussion on perspectives and future scope of work

Maintaining consistency in distributed systems

In systems designed as assemblies of independently developed components, concurrent access to data or data structures normally arises within individual programs, and is controlled using mutual exclusion constructs, such as semaphores and monitors. Where data is persistent and/or sets of operation are related to one another, transactions or linearizability may be more appropriate. Systems that incorporate cooperative styles of distributed execution often replicate or distribute data within groups of components. In these cases, group oriented consistency properties must be maintained, and tools based on the virtual synchrony execution model greatly simplify the task confronting an application developer. All three styles of distributed computing are likely to be seen in future systems - often, within the same application. This leads us to propose an integrated approach that permits applications that use virtual synchrony with concurrent objects that respect a linearizability constraint, and vice versa. Transactional subsystems are treated as a special case of linearizability

F-formation Detection: Individuating Free-standing Conversational Groups in Images

Detection of groups of interacting people is a very interesting and useful task in many modern technologies, with application fields spanning from video-surveillance to social robotics. In this paper we first furnish a rigorous definition of group considering the background of the social sciences: this allows us to specify many kinds of group, so far neglected in the Computer Vision literature. On top of this taxonomy, we present a detailed state of the art on the group detection algorithms. Then, as a main contribution, we present a brand new method for the automatic detection of groups in still images, which is based on a graph-cuts framework for clustering individuals; in particular we are able to codify in a computational sense the sociological definition of F-formation, that is very useful to encode a group having only proxemic information: position and orientation of people. We call the proposed method Graph-Cuts for F-formation (GCFF). We show how GCFF definitely outperforms all the state of the art methods in terms of different accuracy measures (some of them are brand new), demonstrating also a strong robustness to noise and versatility in recognizing groups of various cardinality.Comment: 32 pages, submitted to PLOS On

Beyond Corporate Form: A Response to Dan Depasquale, Surbhi Sarang, and Natalie Bump Vena’s Forging Food Justice Through Cooperatives in New York City

In their article, Forging Food Justice Through Cooperatives in New York City, Dan DePasquale, Surbhi Sarang, and Natalie Bump Vena (the “Authors”) argue that consumer-owned and worker-owned cooperatives hold promise as a means for advancing policy objectives associated with “food justice,” namely building community wealth and power and providing more affordable access to healthy food in low-income and minority communities. Looking to examples of legislation and policies in other jurisdictions, they advocate for a wide range of policies to promote the viability of cooperatives in New York City, including reforms to cooperative corporation laws and strategies for better allocating funding and technical assistance to cooperatives. I largely agree with the Authors’ argument and support their effort to identify practical policy solutions that would help food cooperatives in New York City overcome barriers to success. This Response makes three observations about their proposals. First, this Response observes that food access and economic development are distinct objectives and that consumer and worker cooperatives may have different roles to play in food justice strategies depending on how these objectives are defined and prioritized. Second, the significance of cooperative corporation statutes may be overstated, both because a variety of legal entity forms are available to cooperative organizations (mitigating the impact of potential reforms to New York’s cooperative corporation law) and because the legal form itself does not guarantee adoption of many of the values and principles commonly associated with cooperatives. Third, this Response argues that the role of other, non-cooperative organizational models should not be overlooked in shaping policy in this area. This Response advocates for a more comprehensive strategy that promotes a wide range of community-based businesses and organizations, including but not limited to cooperatives, and that allocates resources according to the identity of organizations’ stakeholders and the degree of their community impact, rather than relying on their legal form