Building KidPad: an application for children's collaborative storytelling

Collaborating in small groups can be beneficial to children's learning and socializing. However, there is currently little computer support for children's collaborative activities. This was our motivation for building KidPad, a collaborative storytelling tool for children. KidPad provides children with drawing, typing, and hyperlinking capabilities in a large, two-dimensional canvas. It supports collaboration by accepting input from multiple mice. In building KidPad, we developed solutions to problems common to all single-display groupware applications for children: using an intuitive user interface metaphor that can support collaboration, and obtaining input from multiple devices. We addressed the need for an appropriate user interface metaphor by using the local tools metaphor. In developing the concept of local tools we learned about the importance of addressing the issue of global modes. Our solution for obtaining input from multiple devices was MID, an architecture written in Java. In building MID, we learned about the importance of building flexible architectures that can support a wide range of applications and devices in a consistent manner, and that are easy to extend and use by programmers. This paper describes our work on local tools and MID in the context of building KidPad, and aims to provide developers with valuable insights into how to develop collaborative applications for children. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Tools for transparent synchronous collaborative environments

Synchronous collaborative environments can provide an identical visual and operable working area among geographically separated participants. There are two basic approaches for providing a shared workspace. They are collaborative-aware approach and collaborative-unaware approach. Since the second approach allows single-user applications to be reused, most users choose to use it. Our work is based on the collaborative-unaware environment. This paper describes the design and implementation of some transparent synchronous collaborative tools. They are: (1) the latecomer support for Java applications, Java applets and JMF players (2) the client synchronization to minimize data transmission latency and (3) the lightweight multi-session support to let different collaboration groups work at the same time. These tools optimize existing transparent synchronous collaboration systems and make them more realistic, more complete and more generic.

Real-time collaboration through web applications: an introduction to the Toolkit for Web-based Interactive Collaborative Environments (TWICE)

The widespread availability of personal mobile devices, combined with the increasing availability of stationary public devices such as large interactive displays, creates new opportunities for computer-supported collaborative work. In particular, these two factors enable the emergence of collaborative scenarios, whether planned or spontaneous, in any location, and previous obstacles to such collaborative settings such as limitations on the number of devices available for use and infrastructure costs can be overcome more easily. As hardware restrictions diminish, the need for software toolkits that simplify the development of distributed collaborative applications allowing for device heterogeneity, true multi-user interaction and spontaneous emergence increases. In this article, we describe the Toolkit for Web-based Interactive Collaborative Environments whose aim is to address these issues. This is done using current standard web technologies extended for real-time application (and structured using specific development guidelines) while ensuring compatibility with the manifold new evolutions in the currently ongoing development of open web platform (HTML5, websockets, etc). While our own work has mainly focused on synchronous co-located collaborative systems (same place/same time), our solution, the technologies used, as well as the concepts that are introduced are easily extendable for remote and/or asynchronous collaboration.     

Enabling collaborative engineering and science at JPL

We examine the issue of distributed collaboration at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). With the goals of “faster, better, cheaper” missions, an efficient, seamless collaboration capability is critical to future JPL space exploration missions. We assert that the current capabilities for distributed collaboration internal to JPL, as well as external, are unsatisfactory. This paper provides a vision of greatly enhanced distributed collaboration capabilities in the near future and into the far future. Our vision focuses primarily on distributed collaborative engineering and science.We believe enhanced capabilities are necessary in two collaborative paradigms: the virtual conference and the shared virtual workspace. We describe these collaborative paradigms, and discuss the tools that exist and the additional capability necessary to achieve the collaborative vision with respect to the types of data we typically work with at JPL. We identify the following types of data frequently exchanged in collaborative activities: project planning data, design data, notes/documentation, communication data, analysis/performance data, verification data and scientific data. Our analysis shows that at present there is good GroupWare support for project planning data and notes/documentation data. Support is improving for design data. Other data types have no or sporadic support at best.     

A human-centric runtime framework for mixed service-oriented systems

A wide range of Web-based tools and socially-enhanced collaboration services have changed models of work. In today??s collaboration systems, interactions typically span a number of people and services to work on joint tasks or to solve emerging problems. Finding the right collaboration partner in Web-based interactions remains challenging due to scale and the temporary nature of collaborations. We argue that humans need different ways to indicate their availability and desire to join collaborations. In this work, we discuss collaboration scenarios where people define services based on their dynamically changing skills and expertise by using Human-Provided Services. This approach is motivated by the need to support novel service-oriented applications in emerging crowdsourcing environments. In such open and dynamic environments, user participation is often driven by intrinsic incentives and actors properties such as reputation. We present a framework enabling users to define personal services to cope with complex interactions. We focus on the discovery and provisioning of human expertise in service-oriented environments.     

Leveraging Java applets: toward collaboration transparency in Java

Widespread use of the Internet is giving rise to the need for collaborative applications that link users at remote sites. Many toolkits support the development of collaboration-aware applications, those developed specifically for cooperative work by multiple users. Another approach is collaboration transparency, the collaborative use of applications originally developed for a single user. When the runtime environment supports collaboration transparency, an application programmer need not write new code to make an application collaborative. Thus, collaboration transparency leverages the existing base of single user applications by extending them to collaborative use. We review options for providing collaboration transparency. We also discuss how collaboration transparency can be incorporated into Sun Microsystems' Java, the most widely used vehicle for developing interactive World Wide Web applications     

A computing theory for collaborative and transparent decision making under time constraint

In this paper, we present a computing theory on the accelerated critical point of selection of proper strategies between collaboration and competition and its mathematical analysis for collaborative and transparent decision making under “time constraint”, i.e., cost of time pressure, which decision makers face in negotiation. Web 2.0 provides a useful digital environment to support various time-stressed human behaviors for collaborative decision making. However, little research has examined the collaborative behavior under time constraint on the Internet in its designs and implementations on electronically supported decision making. Those systems are implemented in black boxes so that we need transparent designs of decision support systems to promote collaboration by time-stressed decision makers. The essential problem on collaborative decision making under time constraint is the discovery and evaluation on the critical point of selection of proper strategies between collaboration and competition. Most of the current decision support systems accept the half of maximum acceptable time for negotiation as a critical point, a priori, though that conventional point is often late for proper decision making. The proposed theory shows that a critical point is to be accelerated at the one-third of maximum acceptable time for negotiation. We have formulated the proposed computing theory based on mathematical formulation, and checked its feasibility in its applications to a case study. The proposed theory promotes collaborative and transparent decision making in consideration of the properties of stakes under time pressure by selecting the strategy of collaboration or competition at the much earlier stage.     

Maintaining constraints of UML models in distributed collaborative environments

Constraint maintenance plays an important role in keeping the integrity and validity of UML models in embedded software design. While constraint maintenance capabilities are reasonably adequate in existing UML modeling applications, little work has been done to address the distributed constraint maintenance issue in multi-user collaborative modeling environments. The nature of the issue is to maintain constraint consistently across distributed sites in a collaborative modeling environment in the face of concurrency. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to this issue, which can retain the effects of all concurrent modeling operations even though they may cause constraint violations. We further contribute a distributed constraint maintenance framework in which the solution is encapsulated as a generic engine that can be mounted in a variety of single-user UML modeling applications to support collaborative UML modeling and distributed constraint maintenance in embedded software design processes. This framework has been implemented in a prototype distributed collaborative UML modeling application CoRSA.     

JASMINE: A Java Tool for Multimedia Collaboration on the Internet

Although collaboration tools have existed for a long time [8], Internet-based multimedia collaboration has recently received a lot of attention mainly due to easy accessibility of the Internet by ordinary users. The Java platform and programming language has also introduced yet another level of easy access: platform-independent computing. As a result, it is very attractive to use Java to design multimedia collaboration systems for the Internet. Today there are many systems, which use Java for multimedia collaboration. However, most of these systems require the shared Java application to be re-written according to the collaboration system's Application Programming Interface (API)—a task which is sometimes difficult or even impossible. In this paper, we describe a practical approach for transparent collaboration with Java. Our approach is transparent in that the Java application can be shared as is with no modifications. The main idea behind our system is that user events occurring through the interactions with the application can be caught, distributed, and reconstructed, hence allowing Java applications to be shared transparently. Our architecture allows us to make the huge installed base of Java applications collaborative, without any modification to their original code. We also prove the feasibility of our architecture by implementation of the JASMINE¹ prototype.     

Designing and implementing multi-user applications: A case study

We have developed a new multi-user application that integrates and extends the concepts in a variety of current multi-user applications. It allows multiple users to store, retrieve and browse through information, communicate information both synchronously and asynchronously, create ‘pipes’ of consistent, editable and persistent views, and interactively specify handlers for events. It has been implemented using the experimental technologies of distributed objects and multi-user editor generation. Our work on this application suggests a new and practical model for designing and implementing multi-user applications. In this paper, we describe the user interface and implementation of the application, give the rationale for our design choices, describe our experience with the tools and techniques used in the implementation, and present conclusions and directions for future work.     

An Integrated Approach to Designing and Evaluating Collaborative Applications and Infrastructures

Collaborative systems include both general infrastructures and specific applications for supporting collaboration. Because of the relative newness and complexity of these systems, it has been unclear what approach should be used to design and evaluate them. Based on the lessons learned from our work and that of others on collaborative systems, we have derived an integrated approach to researching collaborative applications and infrastructures. The approach can be described as a sequence of steps: We decompose the functionality of collaboration systems into smaller functions that can be researched more-or-less independently. For each of these functions, we adopt general (system-independent) principles regarding the design and implementation of the function, identify collaboration scenarios at multiple levels of abstraction, identify requirements based on the scenarios, adopt an interaction model to meet the requirements, realize the interaction model as a concrete user interface, develop a logical architecture of the system, identify a physical architecture for placing the logical components in a distributed system, develop infrastructure abstractions, use the abstractions to implement applications, and perform lab studies, field experiments, and simulations to evaluate the infrastructure and applications. As in other models with multiple phases, feedback from subsequent phases is used to modify the results from the previous phases. In this paper, we describe, illustrate and motivate this research plan.     

Distributed Augmented Reality for Collaborative Design Applications

This paper presents a system for constructing collaborative design applications based on distributed augmented reality. Augmented reality interfaces are a natural method for presenting computer-based design by merging graphics with a view of the real world. Distribution enables users at remote sites to collaborate on design tasks. The users interactively control their local view, try out design options, and communicate design proposals. They share virtual graphical objects that substitute for real objects which are not yet physically created or are not yet placed into the real design environment. We describe the underlying augmented reality system and in particular how it has been extended in order to support multi-user collaboration. The construction of distributed augmented reality applications is made easier by a separation of interface, interaction and distribution issues. An interior design application is used as an example to demonstrate the advantages of our approach.     

A network architecture supporting consistent rich behavior in collaborative interactive applications

Network architectures for collaborative virtual reality have traditionally been dominated by client-server and peer-to-peer approaches, with peer-to-peer strategies typically being favored where minimizing latency is a priority and client-server where consistency is key. With increasingly sophisticated behavior models and the demand for better support for haptics, we argue that neither approach provides sufficient support for these scenarios nor, thus, a hybrid architecture is required. We discuss the relative performance of different distribution strategies in the face of real network conditions and illustrate the problems they face. Finally, we present an architecture that successfully meets many of these challenges and demonstrate its use in a distributed virtual prototyping application which supports simultaneous collaboration for assembly, maintenance, and training applications utilizing haptics.     

POPEYE: providing collaborative services for ad hoc and spontaneous communities

Next generation collaborative systems will offer mobile users seamless and natural collaboration amongst a diversity of agents, within distributed, knowledge-rich and virtualized working environments. This ambitious goal faces numerous challenges from the underlying communication infrastructure to the high level application services, with the aim to provide services with the appropriate quality (such as persistence, synchronization, and security). Most currently available tools supporting collaboration address either rather traditional and rigid intra-organizational collaboration scenarios or, at the opposite, completely free and unstructured open communities’s interactions. Emerging dynamic, flexible and ad hoc collaboration schemes are hardly or not supported at all. The POPEYE framework offers collaborative services for applications that aim to enable spontaneous collaboration over P2P wireless ad hoc groups, where fixed infrastructure is not a prerequisite, where virtual communities can emerge spontaneously and share data with the appropriate quality of service for business applications (persistence, synchronization, security, etc.).     

The foundations of a theory-aware authoring tool for CSCL design

One of the most useful ways to enhance collaboration is to create scenarios where learners are able to interact more effectively. Nevertheless, the design of pedagogically sound and well-thought-out collaborative learning scenarios is a complex issue. This is due to the context of group learning where the synergy among learners’ interactions affects learning processes and, hence, the learning outcome. Although many advances have been made to support the designing of collaborative learning scenarios through technology, a more systematic approach is lacking. With the limitations of the current designing methods and tools, it is difficult to develop intelligent authoring systems that can guide users in order to produce more effective collaboration. One of the main difficulties with creating a more consistent (computer-understandable) approach to designing collaboration is the necessity of proposing better ways to formalize the group learning processes. In this paper, we present an innovative approach that uses ontologies and concepts from learning theories to create a framework that represents collaborative learning and its processes. Ontologies provide the necessary formalization to represent collaboration, while learning theories provide the concepts to justify and support the development of effective learning scenarios. Such an approach contributes to establish the foundations for the development of the next generation of intelligent authoring systems referred to as theory-aware systems. To verify the viability and usefulness of our proposed ontological framework in the context of systematic design, the development and use of an intelligent authoring tool for CSCL design is presented. This system is able to reason on ontologies to give suggestions that help users to create theory-compliant collaborative learning scenarios. We carried out several experiments with teachers in a geometry drawing course and the results indicate that the system helps teachers to create and interchange their scenarios more easily and facilitates the selection of important pedagogical strategies that influence positively the designing and effectiveness of group activities.     

Interactive tree comparison for co-located collaborative information visualization

In many domains increased collaboration has lead to more innovation by fostering the sharing of knowledge, skills, and ideas. Shared analysis of information visualizations does not only lead to increased information processing power, but team members can also share, negotiate, and discuss their views and interpretations on a dataset and contribute unique perspectives on a given problem. Designing technologies to support collaboration around information visualizations poses special challenges and relatively few systems have been designed. We focus on supporting small groups collaborating around information visualizations in a co-located setting, using a shared interactive tabletop display. We introduce an analysis of challenges and requirements for the design of co-located collaborative information visualization systems. We then present a new system that facilitates hierarchical data comparison tasks for this type of collaborative work. Our system supports multi-user input, shared and individual views on the hierarchical data visualization, flexible use of representations, and flexible workspace organization to facilitate group work around visualizations.     

E-Science in the classroom – Towards viability

E-Science has the potential to transform school science by enabling learners, teachers and research scientists to engage together in authentic scientific enquiry, collaboration and learning. However, if we are to reap the benefits of this potential as part of everyday teaching and learning, we need to explicitly think about and support the work required to set up and run e-Science experiences within any particular educational context. In this paper, we present a framework for identifying and describing the resources, tools and services necessary to move e-Science into the classroom together with examples of these. This framework is derived from previous experiences conducting educational e-Science projects and systematic analysis of the categories of ‘hidden work’ needed to run these projects. The articulation of resources, tools and services based on these categories provides a starting point for more methodical design and deployment of future educational e-Science projects, reflection on which can also help further develop the framework. It also points to the technological infrastructure from which such tools and services could be built. As such it provides an agenda of work to develop both processes and technologies that would make it practical for teachers to deliver active, and collaborative e-Science learning experiences on a larger scale within and across schools. Routine school e-Science will only be possible if such support is specified, implemented and made available to teachers within their work contexts in an appropriate and usable form.     

Modeling collaboration protocols for collaborative modeling tools: Experiences and applications

Over the last two decades, Collaborative Systems have become increasingly popular thanks to the many advances made in networks, communications and software tools. Within this field, Collaborative Modeling Systems apply the collaborative paradigm to the construction of (often visual) models, where users build diagrams from building blocks and the relationships between them. In these kinds of applications, the work is usually arranged into sessions, with the definition of some kind of time organization between those sessions. This organization is known as a collaboration protocol. Unfortunately, it is not usually easy to define these protocols, and many applications do not allow users to make any use of them.In an effort to overcome these difficulties, in this paper we propose a visual language for defining collaboration protocols for these systems. As such, in our language, sessions, artifacts and the transformations between them can be specified visually, and different coordination relationships (such as fork and join) can be defined. The visual language is included in a development method for collaborative systems that take advantage of the Eclipse platform in order to develop model-driven graphical editors that are enhanced with collaboration capabilities.     

Collaborative object-oriented visualization environment

In this paper, we present a Collaborative Object-oriented Visualization Environment (COVE) which provides a flexible and extensible framework for collaborative visualization. COVE integrates collaborative and parallel computing environments based on a distributed object model. It is built as a collection of concurrent objects: collaborative and application objects which interact with one another to construct collaborative parallel computing environments. The former enables COVE to execute various collaborative functions, while the latter allows it to execute fast parallel visualization in various modes. Also, flexibility and extensibility are provided by plugging the proper application objects into COVE at run-time, and making them interact with one another through collaboration objects. For our experiment, three visualization modes for volume rendering are designed and implemented to support the fast and flexible analysis of volume data in a collaborative environment. This work has been supported by KIPA-Information Technology Research Center, University research program by Ministry of Information & Communication, and Brain Korea 21 projects in 2005.     

A simulation model for localization of pervasive objects using heterogeneous wireless networks

Position represents a relevant attribute needed by many applications, whose contexts are characterized by pervasiveness of the objects/things in the considered scenarios. In order to infer positions of pervasive objects, which are neither equipped with any location-sensing technologies, nor are unable to locate themselves, it is needed to support them with an appropriate infrastructure, which allows to determine their position in a manner that is transparent to applications. In this work, we aim at extending the positioning service using an agent-based approach, in order to discover and localize different kinds of objects, exploiting cheap and embedded technologies. We describe the design and the implementation of a layered architecture, that supports the localization of devices, and simple pervasive and ubiquitous objects. A simulation tool has been develop to evaluate the proposed solution in different application scenarios of every-day life.