A Lessons-learned System for Construction Project Management: A Preliminary Application

AbstractConstruction companies are project-based organizations, since much of their knowledge is generated on site, from projects they carry out. In fact, projects are an important source of expert know-how and organizational knowledge, but lessons-learned from them are not systematically incorporated into subsequent projects, evidencing a lack of knowledge management and learning culture in local construction companies. This article describes a research effort that addressed this situation and developed a lessons-learned system to help construction companies to overcome these limitations. A multiple case-study methodology was applied to understand the knowledge and learning realities and needs of three Chilean construction companies. Based on these results, a mobile cloud-shared workspace to support knowledge management was developed. Results show that major concerns of users are associated with how the system acknowledges the particularities of construction projects and how it will be incorporated into daily activities. Main conclusions indicate that (1) companies acknowledge the need to develop a culture of innovation within the organization, (2) users consider the system as a tool that could really contribute to improve the construction project management process, and (3) the system needs improvements regarding database search and the Internet support before being fully implemented in the company as a project management tool

A Lessons-learned Mobile System for Construction Companies: Motivation and Design

AbstractConstruction projects are an important source of organizational knowledge. Though, it is common to find that most lessons learned in construction projects are lost because most companies never take care of collecting them. To change this situation, a mobile lesson-learned system application with interface for smartphones and web in a cloud environment is proposed. This article focuses on the design of a prototype of the system and the main characteristics of its architecture. It is concluded that the application of mobile technology on the field would facilitate the use of the system, been an appropriate tool for knowledge management

A Mobile Portfolio to Support Communities of Practice in Science Education

Online Communities and Social Computing Second International Conference, OCSC 2007, Held as Part of HCI International 2007, Beijing, China, July 22-27, 2007. ProceedingsPractice 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

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

The Iceberg Effect: Behind the User Interface of Mobile Collaborative Systems

Advances in mobile technologies are opening new possibilities to support collaborative activities through mobile devices. Unfortunately, mobile collaborative systems have been difficult to conceive, design and implement. These difficulties are caused in part by their unclear requirements and developers’ lack of experience with this type of systems. However, several requirements involved in the collaborative back-end of these products are recurrent and should be considered in every development. This paper introduces a characterization of mobile collaboration and a framework that specifies a list of general requirements to be considered during the conception and design of a system in order to increase its probability of success. This framework was used in the development of two mobile collaborative systems, providing developers with a base of back-end requirements to aid system design and implementation. The systems were positively evaluated by their users

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 User-Centered Mobile Cloud Computing Platform for Improving Knowledge Management in Small-to-Medium Enterprises in the Chilean Construction Industry

Knowledge management (KM) is a key element for the development of small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) in the construction industry. This is particularly relevant in Chile, where this industry is composed almost entirely of SMEs. Although various KM system proposals can be found in the literature, they are not suitable for SMEs, due to usability problems, budget constraints, and time and connectivity issues. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) systems offer several advantages to construction SMEs, but they have not yet been exploited to address KM needs. Therefore, this research is aimed at the development of a MCC-based KM platform to manage lessons learned in different construction projects of SMEs, through an iterative and user-centered methodology. Usability and quality evaluations of the proposed platform show that MCC is a feasible and attractive option to address the KM issues in SMEs of the Chilean construction industry, since it is possible to consider both technical and usability requirements

MobiCOP: A Scalable and Reliable Mobile Code Offloading Solution

Code offloading is a popular technique for extending the natural capabilities of mobile devices by migrating processor-intensive tasks to resource-rich surrogates. Despite multiple platforms for offloading being available in academia, these frameworks have yet to permeate the industry. One of the primary reasons for this is limited experimentation in practical settings and lack of reliability, scalability, and options for distribution. This paper introduces MobiCOP, a new code offloading framework designed from the ground up with these requirements in mind. It features a novel design fully self-contained in a library and offers compatibility with most stock Android devices available today. Compared to local task executions, MobiCOP offers performance improvements of up to 17x and increased battery efficiency of up to 25x, shows minimum performance degradation in environments with unstable networks, and features an autoscaling module that allows its server counterpart to scale to an arbitrary number of offloading requests. It is compatible with the most relevant Android technologies optimized for heavy computation (NDK and Renderscript) and has so far been well received by fellow mobile developers. We hope MobiCOP will help bring mobile code offloading closer to the industry realm

Sharing information resources in mobile ad-hoc networks

Artículo de publicaciónMany people are sharing digital resources through networks in order to facilitate, enhance or improve collaborative work. Information sharing is not only important to support collaborative work but it also represents the basis for design and implementation of solutions for typical design aspects of groupware applications, such as: floor control, group memory, shared objects replication and sessions and users management. Advances in mobile technology have extended the sharing information scenarios to Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), which has brought new challenges. This paper presents a simple service platform to share information resources among members of a MANETsupported groupware session. People interact using notebooks and PDAs. In addition, a shared presentation tool which has been developed using the services of the platform is described. This presentation tool can be used to assist other collaborative activities, such as: technical presentations, casual interactions, meetings for decision making and software technical reviews