Integrating Service-Oriented Mobile Units to Support Collaboration in Ad-hoc Scenarios

Abstract: Advances in wireless communication and mobile computing extend collaboration scenarios. Mobile workers using computing devices are currently able to collaborate in order to carry out productive, educational or social activities. Typically, collaborative applications intended to support mobile workers involve some type of centralized data or services, because they are designed to work on infrastructure supported wireless networks. This centralization constrains the collaboration capabilities in ad-hoc communication cases. This paper introduces the concept of Service-Oriented Mobile Unit (SOMU) in order to reduce such limitation. SOMU is an autonomous software infrastructure running on a computing device; it is able to be integrated to ad-hoc networks and it can interoperate with other mobile units in ad-hoc collaboration scenarios. In addition, the paper presents the challenges faced when designing and implementing the SOMU platform. It also describes an application developed on SOMU

DESIGNING EMOTIONAL AWARENESS DEVICES: WHAT ONE SEES IS WHAT ONE FEELS DISEÑANDO DISPOSITIVOS CON AWARENESS EMOCIONAL: LO QUE UNO VE ES LO QUE UNO SIENTE

Interpersonal communication involves more than just words; it involves emotion. Emotions can be roughly seen as complex organized internal states. Awareness of those states would allow human beings to evaluate social information and develop strategic social intelligence and hence, everyday actions convey social meaning and emotion. This paper reports an experience for supporting public-emotion based dialogs, where emotions are expressed, captured and transmitted between distant participants using tangible interfaces. We also exploit the social meaning of an everyday physical object such as a portrait, in order to create affective interfaces. We describe as well, a device that allows Emotional Awareness and supports the affective interpersonal interaction among people across distance.<br>La comunicación interpersonal requiere más que solamente palabras, involucra emociones. En términos generales las emociones pueden ser vistas como estados internos complejamente organizados. El Awareness de estos estados permitiría a los seres humanos evaluar la información social y desarrollar inteligencia social estratégica y, por lo tanto, las acciones cotidianas estarían teñidas de significado social y emocional. Este artículo reporta una experiencia que busca permitir un diálogo basado en emociones expresadas, capturadas y transmitidas entre diversos participantes usando interfaces tangibles. Además, se explota el significado social de objetos físicos y cotidianos como un portarretratos, con el fin de crear interfaces afectivas entre usuarios dispersos geográficamente. En este artículo se describe un dispositivo que permite un tipo de Awareness emocional apoyando la interacción interpersonal y afectiva entre personas distantes geográficamente

A reusable structural design for mobile collaborative applications

Architecting mobile collaborative applications has always been a challenge for designers. However, counting on a structural design as a reference can help developers to reduce risks and efforts involved in system design. This article presents a reusable architecture which helps modeling the communication and coordination services required by mobile collaborative applications to support collaboration among users. This architecture has been used as a basis for the design of several mobile systems. Two of them are presented in this article to show the applicability of the proposal to real world collaborative systems. © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.This work was partially supported by Fondecyt (Chile), grant Nos: 11090224, 11060467 and 1080352 and LACCIR grant No: R0308LAC005.Neyem, A.; Ochoa, S.; Pino, J.; Franco Pereyra, RD. (2012). A reusable structural design for mobile collaborative applications. Journal of Systems and Software. 85(3):511-524. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2011.05.046S51152485

A mobile portfolio to support communities of practice in science education

Practice activities are a key issue for science education students. Typically, these activities are carried out by a community of practice (practicing students and professors) using physical or centralized electronic portfolios. However, these alternatives are limited when the community members need to share the portfolio resources, any time and anywhere. This limitation is also present when support for high interactivity among these persons is required. This paper presents a new kind of portfolio which is able to work in autonomous, client-server, and peer-to-peer manners. This mobile portfolio is fully distributed; therefore, it improves the flexibility to conduct interactions or share portfolio resources among the members of a community of practice. The functionality and stability of the tool have been tested by the developers and the results obtained are encouraging. The use of this distributed portfolio is expected to help science students and professors to enhance practice activities, interactions and interchange of experiences and resources