System Integration Techniques of Sharing and Collaboration among Work-groups, Computers and Processes

Systems Engineering (SE) and Concurrent Engineering (CE) implies sharing of information, data, process and knowledge [20] across different levels in an enterprise. Division of work into classes and then to the work-groups or to the concurrent sub-teams is one form of sharing large organizations like Ford Motor and General Motors have used [29]. Other forms of sharing are governed by the state of computer communications, workstation and database technologies [9]. For accomplishing the needed collaboration (and to facilitate concurrent engineering), several concepts and models for work-group computing were tried at Delphi Divisional units of Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and General Motors. Based on such experiences, the paper describes Systems Engineering and CE techniques for sharing information in a concurrent engineering organization, which has been found most effective for collaborating knowledge among a set of multidisciplinary work-groups, array of computers and processes.     

Reference Resolution Challenges for Intelligent Agents: The Need for Knowledge

This paper presents a vision of how language-endowed, next-generation intelligent agents might resolve—that is, fully interpret—references to objects and events in language input. It describes some of the more difficult reference phenomena that are not being sufficiently treated by practical systems and suggests what kinds of knowledge must be available to intelligent agents to enable them to reach human competence in reference resolution.     

The Effect of Collaboration Styles and View Independence on Video-Mediated Remote Collaboration

This paper investigates how different collaboration styles and view independence affect remote collaboration. Our remote collaboration system shares a live video of a local user’s real-world task space with a remote user. The remote user can have an independent view or a dependent view of a shared real-world object manipulation task and can draw virtual annotations onto the real-world objects as a visual communication cue. With the system, we investigated two different collaboration styles; (1) remote expert collaboration where a remote user has the solution and gives instructions to a local partner and (2) mutual collaboration where neither user has a solution but both remote and local users share ideas and discuss ways to solve the real-world task. In the user study, the remote expert collaboration showed a number of benefits over the mutual collaboration. With the remote expert collaboration, participants had better communication from the remote user to the local user, more aligned focus between participants, and the remote participants’ feeling of enjoyment and togetherness. However, the benefits were not always apparent at the local participants’ end, especially with measures of enjoyment and togetherness. The independent view also had several benefits over the dependent view, such as allowing remote participants to freely navigate around the workspace while having a wider fully zoomed-out view. The benefits of the independent view were more prominent in the mutual collaboration than in the remote expert collaboration, especially in enabling the remote participants to see the workspace.     

Computer Graphics: The Need for Graphics Design Part Two

The best use of color and design requires an experienced graphics designer. But even engineers and businessmen can improve the appearance of their information displays.     

The Need for Research into Creativity in Marketing

A convenience sample of 36 online journals was taken as the source of information for this study. Management and marketing journals at a major publishing house were analysed in order to find out what they had to say about creativity. A search over the period 1989–99 found 29 articles which included creativity as one of the keywords. The area of marketing revealed a range of applications for creativity thinking. It is suggested that marketing executives need to be creative in order to enable their organisations to match the activities of their competitors and meet the needs of a rapidly changing environment.     

Computer Graphics: The Need for Graphics Design Part One

Graphics design and computer graphics should be inseparable partners, not virtual strangers. This is the first of two articles examining the relationship between the two fields.     

Collaboration and Trust in Healthcare Innovation: The eDiaMoND Case Study

This paper presents findings from an investigation into requirements for collaboration in e-Science in the context of eDiaMoND, a Grid-enabled prototype system intended in part to support breast cancer screening. Detailed studies based on ethnographic fieldwork reveal the importance of accountability and visibility of work for trust and for the various forms of ‘practical ethical action’ in which clinicians are seen to routinely engage in this setting. We discuss the implications of our findings, specifically for the prospect of using distributed screening to make more effective use of scarce clinical skills and, more generally, for realising the Grid’s potential for sharing data within and across institutions. Understanding how to afford trust and to provide adequate support for ethical concerns relating to the handling of sensitive data is a particular challenge for e-Health systems and for e-Science in general. Future e-Health and e-Science systems will need to be compatible with the ways in which trust is achieved, and practical ethical actions are realised and embedded within work practices.     

The Future of Social Networks on the Internet: The Need for Semantics

Everyone on the Internet knows the buzzword social networking. Social networking services (SNS) usually offer the same basic functionalities: network of friends listings, person surfing, private messaging etc. With such features, SNSs demonstrate how the Internet continues to better connect people for various social and professional purposes. The fundamental problems with today's SNSs block their potential to access the full range of available content and networked people online. A possible solution is to build semantic social networking into the fabric of the next-generation Internet itself-interconnecting both content and people in meaningful ways. The semantic Web is a useful platform for linking and for performing operations on diverse person-and object-related data gathered from heterogeneous social networking sites. In the other direction, object-centered networks can serve as rich data sources for semantic Web applications.     

The Need for a SiP Design and Test Infrastructure

Although successful and profitable applications have proven themselves in several market segments, significant challenges in system-in-package design and test remain for broader adoption.     

Culture in the Age of Convergence: The Need for a New Policy Stance and Platform for Europe

 This paper examines some implications for cultural policy in the context of globalisation of trade and convergence of technologies. Issues are specifically examined in the aftermath of the inconclusive World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle in 1999. The paper argues for the relevance of Australian experiences in the formulation of a cultural response and cites examples which may be relevant to Europe and elsewhere. It asserts that the concepts of `creative infrastructure' and `communications platform' offer a particularly effective formulation of the necessary resource base. Accepted: 21 June 2002     

Documents in Place: Demarcating Places for Collaboration in Healthcare Settings

The notion of place often connotes our understood reality populated with people, practices, meanings, and artifacts. This paper suggests that documents, whether electronic, paper-based, or set in stone, offer important insights into how people establish and maintain places for communication and coordination. Data from an ethnographic study in a large hospital system illustrates how doctors carefully craft their medical histories in various electronic record systems to demarcate specific places for their communication and coordination with specific collaborators. Such documents serve as portable places, allowing the doctors to navigate a constantly changing landscape of relevant patients, participants, times, and spaces. The documents demarcate such places by pointing out the interdependencies among particular participants, places, and times. Doctors care deeply about these documents and they play a central part not only in securing efficient communication and coordination but also in the socialization of newcomers. A study of the complex interrelationships between documents and place, therefore, offers important insights into organizational environments characterized by distributed and mobile work practices.     

The Need for Innovation: a Case History from the Water Industry

Anglian Water is a global water company with Anglo Scandinavian origins. It provides utility services and is a leader in water and wastewater technology and vocational learning through Aqua Universitas the University of Water. It employs over 5,000 people and operates through exclusive subsidiaries or in partnerships. The turnover is almost £800M per year—of which 20% is international. The changing nature of water management has provided a case example of innovation in practice. The case is described with particular reference to Anglian Water. A more formal model framework for innovation is prescribed.     

The Need for Fast Communication in Hardware-Based Speculative Chip Multiprocessors

Chip-multiprocessor (CMP) architectures are a promising design alternative to exploit the ever-increasing number of transistors that can be put on a die. To deliver high performance on applications that cannot be easily parallelized, CMPs can use additional support for speculatively executing the possibly data-dependent threads of an application. For cross-thread dependences that must be handled dynamically, the threads can be made to synchronize and communicate either at the register level or at the memory level. In the past, it has been unclear whether the higher hardware cost of register-level communication is cost-effective. In this paper, we show that the wide-issue dynamic processors that will soon populate CMPs, make fast communication a requirement for high performance. Consequently, we propose an effective hardware mechanism to support communication and synchronization of registers between on-chip processors. Our scheme adds enough support to enable register-level communication without specializing the architecture toward speculation much. Finally, our scheme allows the system to achieve near ideal performance.     

What can Studies of e-Learning Teach us about Collaboration in e-Research? Some Findings from Digital Library Studies

e-Research is intended to facilitate collaboration through distributed access to content, tools, and services. Lessons about collaboration are extracted from the findings of two large, long-term digital library research projects. Both the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype Project (ADEPT) and the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) project on data management leverage scientific research data for use in teaching. Two forms of collaboration were studied: (1) direct, in which faculty work together on research projects; and (2) indirect or serial, in which faculty use or contribute content to a common pool, such as teaching resources, concepts and relationships, or research data. Five aspects of collaboration in e-Research are discussed: (1) disciplinary factors, (2) incentives to adopt e-Learning and e-Research technologies, (3) user roles, (4) information sharing, and (5) technical requirements. Collaboration varied by research domain in both projects, and appears partly to be a function of the degree of instrumentation in data collection. Faculty members were more interested in tools to manage their own research data than in tools to facilitate teaching. They also were more reflective about their research than teaching activities. The availability of more content, tools, and services to incorporate primary data in teaching was only a minimal incentive to use these resources. Large investments in a knowledge base of scientific concepts and relationships for teaching did not result in re-use by other faculty during the course of the project. Metadata requirements for research and for teaching vary greatly, which further complicates the transfer of resources across applications. Personal digital libraries offer a middle ground between private control and public release of content, which is a promising direction for the design of digital libraries that will facilitate collaboration in e-Research.     

Tailoring as Collaboration: The Mediating Role of Multiple Representations and Application Units

In this paper we see tailoring as indirectlong-term collaboration between developers and users:initiated by developers when they build softwaresystems, and responded to by end users when they latertailor the systems. We have identified two features weconsider important when supporting this kind ofcollaboration: multiple representations andapplication units. Their main benefit is that they canenhance communication between developers and users,hence making it easier for users to do the tailoring.We present two tailorable systems we have built totest these ideas. One of the systems (ECHOES) is acollaborative system based on multiplerepresentations, and the other system (BasicDraw) isan individual productivity tool based on multiplerepresentations and application units. We discusslessons learned from the two projects and suggestdirections for future work, including identifying somechallenges that need to be overcome in order to bringend-user tailoring out of the prototyping laboratoryand into user organizations.     

模糊PID控制器在聚丙烯生产中的应用

以聚丙烯生产为工业背景,针对聚丙烯的生产过程是一个大滞后、时变、非线性的复杂系统,普通PID控制器有参数整定不良,性能欠佳,对运行工矿的适应性很差等方面的问题,本文提出了模糊加PID的控制方案,并结合聚合反应控制的特点,提出了聚合反应温度的模糊加PID控制的方案,并取得了较好的仿真结果。