Tutorials

The 2011 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems

(CTS 2011)

May 23-27, 2011

The Sheraton University City Hotel

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Tutorials

T1

T2

T3

T4

T5

T6

Collaborative, Open Source Web Capability for Testing Compliance to Geospatial Web Services Standards

(3.0 hrs)

(3.0 hrs)

(3.0 hrs)

(3.0 hrs)

(2.0 hrs)

(2.0 hrs)

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Luis Bermudez

Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), Virginia, USA

Product Lifecycle Management in Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs)

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Guillaume Ducellier, Université de Technologie de Troyes, France

Yannick Charlot, PI3C Company, France

Trust Networks: Interpersonal, Sensor, and Social

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Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan and Pramod Anatharam

Kno.e.sis - Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing, Wright State University, Ohio, USA

Collaborative Document Management and Knowledge Work

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Steinar Kristoffersen

Østfold University College, Halden, Norway

When are Clouds useful and how can you find out if they are for you using FutureGrid?

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Geoffrey C. Fox

Community Grids Laboratory, Indiana University, Indiana, USA

Computer Supported Cooperative Work: A Convergence of Several Computer Science Fields

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Prasun Dewan

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

T1: Collaborative, Open Source Web Capability for Testing Compliance to Geospatial Web Services Standards (3.0 hrs)

Luis Bermudez

Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), Virginia, USA

BRIEF TUTORIAL DESCRIPTION

In most cases, a collaboration system needs to be a system of communicating systems that exchange service requests and responses in order to share data and processing resources. Such inter-system communication typically depends on open standards, including TCP/IP and HTTP and other standards. If the component systems need to communicate simple or complex geospatial data and services, the framework of open standards almost always includes OGC Web Services (OWS) standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). When properly implemented by developers, OGC standards enable different location-enabled software systems to interoperate, despite the complexity and heterogeneity of geoprocessing systems. Even simple latitude/longitude coordinates can be encoded in many different ways. Geoprocessing systems include geographic information systems, navigation systems, Earth imaging systems, spatial databases, climate models, sensor webs, location services, map browsers and others.

Practical communication of geoprocessing services depends on users and providers having a way to know whether products and systems comply with the standards that enable interoperability. The OGC's Compliance Testing Program (CITE) program, is an ongoing initiative that develops tests for OGC standards, and makes those tests available for online testing. The goal of CITE is to increase systems interoperability while reducing technology risks by providing a process whereby compliance for OGC specifications can be tested.

CITE is part of the OGC's Interoperability Program, which runs rapid-prototyping testbeds, pilot projects and interoperability experiments. OGC standards usually originate in these initiatives. In addition to prototyping standards, the initiatives provide an opportunity for sponsors and participants to test standards and products that implement the standards, and to develop discussion papers to solicit public input on interoperability topics. This resource for collaboration system development and testing will be discussed.

BIOGRAPHY

Luis E. Bermudez has a Ph.D. and M.S. in Hydroinformatics from Drexel University, and an M.S. in Industrial Engineering from the Andes University in Bogota, Colombia. He has 15 years of experience in software development, GIS, knowledge representation, semantic web, data integration and international project management. His pioneering work in ontology and geospatial metadata frameworks has advanced the cyberinfrastructure of environmental observatories in the US and abroad.

T2: Product Lifecycle Management in Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs): What is, Will be, and Should be for a Performant Collaborative Project Management Platform (3.0 hrs)

Guillaume Ducellier, Université de Technologie de Troyes, France

Yannick Charlot, PI3C Company, France

BRIEF TUTORIAL DESCRIPTION

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) was a major trend of the last decade for large industrial groups. The globalization of markets and the evolution of offered services highlighted the needs for better competitiveness at each phase of the product development. Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) faced this context in the mean-time. However, because of the lack of time, investment opportunities or adaptation of existing PLM platforms to their needs, SMEs hardly progressed forward in PLM integration.

In this tutorial, we propose to present what PLM is and should be to meet SMEs needs without postponing their particular constraints. Based on the illustration of best practices for PLM dedicated to SMEs, we present a service-oriented PLM platform that achieves parts of SMEs needs. These best practices come from a 3-year research project between two companies, UTT and PI3C, which proposes remote access to PLM for SMEs. A synthesis is then proposed that tends to highlight key characteristics in the domains of collaborative design and knowledge management.

While researches in these domains have hardly adapted to SMEs and are often misunderstood by engineers, we propose a roadmap that could be effective for SMEs’ appropriation of PLM concepts and technologies. To set up this roadmap, we propose first to detail what should be done to adapt these researches to SMEs context. Second, we focus on the proposition of a PLM platform dedicated to SMEs. Third, we present the key interest of SMEs for dealing with project memory after having developed PLM in their process.

BIOGRAPHIES

Guillaume Ducellier currently is Assistant Professor at the Troyes University of Technology, France. He obtained a PhD degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2008. He carries out his research work at the Laboratory of Mechanical Systems and Concurrent Engineering (LASMIS) of the Charles Delaunay Institute, France. His research interests include collaborative design, product lifecycle management and knowledge management.

Yannick Charlot is currently a PhD student at the Laboratory of Mechanical Systems and Concurrent Engineering (LASMIS) of the Troyes University of Technology and in association with the Pi3C Company (Collaborative Engineering Platform of Cités-en-Champagne). His thesis deals with the improvement of the Product Lifecycle Management traceability and the development of a project memory tool in a design process context. His research is related to collaborative product development, knowledge management, traceability, project memory and product lifecycle management.

T3: Trust Networks: Interpersonal, Sensor, and Social (3.0 hrs)

Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan and Pramod Anatharam

Kno.e.sis - Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing, Wright State University, Ohio, USA

BRIEF TUTORIAL DESCRIPTION

Trust relationships occur naturally in many diverse contexts such as e-commerce, social interactions, social networks, ad hoc mobile networks, distributed systems, decision-support systems, (semantic) sensor web, emergency response scenarios, etc. As the connections and interactions between humans and/or machines (collectively called agents) evolve, and as the agents providing content and services become increasingly removed from the agents that consume them, miscreants attempt to corrupt, subvert or attack existing infrastructure. This in turn calls for support for robust trust inference (e.g., gleaning, aggregation, propagation) and update (also called trust management). Interpersonal trust plays a crucial role in everyday decision making. Unfortunately, there is neither a universal notion of trust that is applicable to all domains nor a clear explication of its semantics in many situations. Because Web, social networking and sensor information often provide complementary and overlapping information about an activity or event that are critical for overall situational awareness, there is a unique need for developing an understanding of and techniques for managing trust that span all these information channels. In this tutorial, we motivate the trust problem, summarize the state-of-the art in trust research, discuss challenges confronting us, and present an overview of our research accomplishments.

BIOGRAPHIES

Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan (T. K. Prasad) is a Professor at Kno.e.sis - Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing, Wright State University, Dayton, OH-45435, USA. His primary research interests are in the areas of Trusted Semantic Sensor Web, Analysis of Social Media, and Information Extraction and Retrieval. His recent research has been funded by AFRL and NSF. He has B. Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from I.I.T., Madras, M. E. degree in Computer Science from I.I.Sc., Bangalore, India, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from State University of New York at Stony Brook, New York, USA.

Pramod Anantharam is a doctoral student at Kno.e.sis - Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing, Wright State University, Dayton, OH-45435, USA. His research interests are in the areas of Trusted Semantic Sensor Web, Social Networks, and Machine Intelligence (including robotics). He has a B. E. degree in Electronics Engineering from B.M.S. College, Bangalore, India.

T4: Collaborative Document Management and Knowledge Work (3.0 hrs)

Steinar Kristoffersen

Østfold University College, Halden, Norway

BRIEF TUTORIAL DESCRIPTION

This tutorial introduces information design, architecture and technology topics related to collaborative document production, version control and publishing, within the broader scope of knowledge management. The central part of the tutorial is an introduction, analysis and lessons learned from representative research directions dealing with knowledge management and information spaces.

It is often the starting point for examinations of this topic that assertions about the state of the work can be refined from data to information to knowledge. Furthermore, knowledge is either explicit of tacit, for instance.

The problem is that both these categorizations are rather coarse and not easily operationalized in design work with state-of-the-art technologies, such as Microsoft Sharepoint Server ©® or the semantic web. The definitions of the concepts make them rather evasive, and at certain levels they seem unrepresentable in an IT-system.

This tutorial briefly surveys the historical development of “organizational memory”, before moving to different strategies for representing and supporting knowledge work. It is not intended as a technology review or technical session, but shall demonstrate some examples from case studies using relevant technologies.

BIOGRAPHY

Steinar Kristoffersen, holding a DPhil. in Computing from Lancaster University is a Professor of Information Technology at Østfold University College, where he has been teaching Interaction Design and Mobile IT since 2007. He is also a researcher at Møreforskning AS Molde, where he works with applied science in logistics and IT. He has previously been a consultant and entrepreneur, and spent time at the University of Oslo as well as Gothenburg. Steinar Kristioffersen has published in other IFIP conferences previously, CHI, ECSCW, Ubicomp as well as international journals on information systems, e-commerce and ubiquitous computing.

T5: When are Clouds useful and how can you find out if they are for you using FutureGrid? (2.0 hrs)

Geoffrey C. Fox

Community Grids Laboratory, Indiana University, Indiana, USA

BRIEF TUTORIAL DESCRIPTION

This tutorial has two components. The first covers clouds (private and public) and compares to Grid and High Performance computing (e.g. MPI) both in terms of technologies and application performance. Second, we discuss both Infrastructure as a Service and the growing sophistication of cloud platforms – in particular technologies like MapReduce and data parallel file systems. We describe Twister – a technology that interpolates between MPI and MapReduce. The FutureGrid (FG) testbed provides computing capabilities that will enable researchers to tackle complex research challenges related to the use of Grids, Clouds and HPC. The FG testbed includes a geographically distributed set of heterogeneous computing systems, of about 5000 cores, a data management system that will hold both metadata and a growing library of software images necessary for Cloud computing, and a dedicated network allowing isolated, secure experiments. The testbed supports virtual machine-based environments, as well as operating systems on native hardware for experiments aimed at minimizing overhead and maximizing performance.

BIOGRAPHY

Geoffrey Charles Fox (http://www.infomall.org, http://www.futuregrid.org, gcf@indiana.edu) received a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Cambridge University and is now professor of Informatics and Computing, and Physics at Indiana University where he is director of the Digital Science Center and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies at the School of Informatics and Computing. He previously held positions at Caltech, Syracuse University and Florida State University. He has supervised the PhD of 62 students and published over 600 papers in physics and computer science. He currently works in applying computer science to Bioinformatics, Defense, Earthquake and Ice-sheet Science, Particle Physics and Chemical Informatics. He is principal investigator of FutureGrid – a new facility to enable development of new approaches to computing. He is involved in several projects to enhance the capabilities of Minority Serving Institutions.

T6: Computer Supported Cooperative Work: A Convergence of Several Computer Science Fields (2.0 hrs)

Prasun Dewan

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

BRIEF TUTORIAL DESCRIPTION

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is often considered a combination of several disciplines including computer science, psychology, sociology, education, and medicine. In this tutorial, we will argue that it is also a convergence of several subfields of computer science including distributed systems, networking, databases, mobile computing, user-interfaces, software engineering, computer vision, machine learning, data mining, and computer security/access control. The talk will make no assumptions about the background of the audience members. Even though it will focus on examples from the research of our group, it should serve as a broad overview of the state of the art and contemporary open problems in CSCW.

BIOGRAPHY

PRASUN DEWAN is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received a B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology of New Delhi and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Wisconsin at Madison. His research interests are in frameworks for implementing single-user and multi-user applications. He has been an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction, ACM Transactions on Information Systems, and Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work.