Usage of current computers is limited in collaborative work in face-to-face meeting because architecture of the most computers is designed considering their personal use. This paper discusses collaborative work of organizing information represented on cards as one of the commonly seen activities in both business and school education. The authors developed a prototype system to computerize such task so as to enhance reuse of products of the collaborative work. The developed system is implemented as an application of Single Display Groupware (SDG) to allow manipulation by multiple users sharing information on a display.
In this paper, we present considerations for natural language processing for a lifelong learning companion. In the context of these considerations, we review related work in automated assessment of learner writing and present an idea for augmenting keyword spotting with syntactic information. However, the extra information given by syntax is offset by parser errors and added burden on the author. The results suggest that while standard keyword spotting is a quick approach to adding NLU capabilities it has inherent limitations.
Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs), defined as systems that allow performing some collaborative tasks in a virtual world, were proposed since 1990. From the beginning, these systems were developed as particular applications of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in a virtual reality world, with specific restrictions on both collaborative work and technological (hardware and software) requirements. Therefore, design guidelines which could be applied to new developments have not been proposed. This paper presents a general framework for designing and developing CSCW systems in virtual 3D environments, which integrates new methodologies that provide clear and formal techniques to develop CSCW, interactive and 3D systems.
This paper outlines the development of a stereoscopic game included in the design of a pilot transmedia storytelling campaign for health promotion and communication of basic concepts about vision and perception for a target audience of children under six and their families in a research clinic setting. The game utilizes the 3D phantogram technique (anamorphically distorted projection onto a horizontal surface) to implement a two-person multitouch game using the Unity 3D engine and IZ3D drivers on the Microsoft Surface tabletop display. Viewed from an appropriate height and position, virtual objects and characters appear to stand directly on the tabletop, facilitating a direct and intuitive mixed reality interface. The technical challenges included occlusion of stereoscopic images by users' hands, the generation of appropriate perspectives for multiple users, and the integration of a two-dimensional multitouch surface with a three-dimensional stereoscopic display.
Virtual worlds are setting up new standards in software engineering for building virtual learning environments (VLE) today. Open Qwaq, which is based on Open Croquet architecture offers to both programmers and domain experts nearly an unlimited capabilities for creating novel computer-based simulated environments. But, even being built using a highly dynamic, reflective language and self-exploratory Squeak/Smalltalk IDE, it still suffers from tight bindings to client-server architecture, platform dependence and third-party tools. That leads to unnecessary inflexibility to develop or deploy new or existing virtual worlds on heterogeneous ad hoc networks. The article describes efforts being done for bringing Open Croquet/OpenQwaq SDK more closer to a mobile VLE development platform. Krestianstvo SDK is proposed as a one-click application, for instantly setting up a VLE in classroom's network, ART installation, educational disc and similar environments with support of augmented reality and collaborative tangible user interfaces.
In the last few years, the Web has been established as a platform for interactive applications. However, creating Web applications involves numerous challenges since the Web has been created to serve static content. In particular, the separation of the client- and the server-side, being only connected through the unidirectional Hypertext Transfer Protocol, forces developers to apply two programming languages including different libraries, conventions, and tools. Developers create expert knowledge by specializing on a few of all involved technologies. Consequently, the diverse knowledge of team members makes collaboration in Web development laboriously. We present the Orca framework that allows developers to work collaboratively on client-server applications in a single object-oriented programming language. Based on the Smalltalk programming language, full access to existing libraries, and a bidirectional messaging abstraction, Orca provides a consistent environment that supports common idioms and patterns in client- and server-side code. It reduces expert knowledge and the number of development tools and, thus, facilitates the collaboration of Web developers.
We describe an experimental setting of creative collaborative writing in an elementary school in Finland, among a group of 5th and 6th graders. They were provided with small portable computers ("netbooks") and ubiquitous access through WLAN and 3G to a collaborative writing service based on Ether Pad. The computers and service were used for three months to produce manuscripts for a musical. Our work is an exploratory characterization of the usage patterns and customs that emerged, as they can be detected post hoc from the automatically revisioned writings and online discussions.
Recently, there are classes using GUI programming environment such as Squeak Etoys or Scratch in primary education. When children study in such environment, children do not have enough opportunity to view the other's works and show their own work to parents and it is difficult to perform mutual evaluation and review lesson. In this paper, we propose an environment where children or parents can view the children's works on virtual space. It can provide opportunities for children to do mutual evaluation or review the past lesson. We have deployed this system to classes using GUI-programming environment and conducted a questionnaire for children. As a result, seven out of eleven children could view the other's works well. Moreover, eight out of ten children could find a scene in which other children watch the work together, and among these children, six of them viewed this attracting work.
Recently, collaborative works supported by computers through real time communication have been introduced to various human activities. New kinds of devices such as iPhone, iPad and Android terminals are in common use. In this situation there is a high demand on environment for users to perform collaborative works using their own terminals. We are developing a framework for collaborative works based on the replicated computing. In this paper, we focus on the difference of development and runtime environment depending on terminals, and will provide the software architecture which makes the framework possible to run on heterogeneous language platforms. We will also show a result of a performance evaluation and the effect on the reduction of the framework development cost.
Context-oriented programming (COP) describes language extensions for modularizing behavioral or structural variations that are to be composed at run-time. Different COP infrastructures and implementations offer several strategies for scoping, activation, and deactivation of such compositional units. Often, the mechanisms employed cause substantial execution overhead. In this paper we present an optimization technique for ContextJS -- our COP extension to JavaScript -- that can significantly reduce this overhead to run context-aware code efficiently.
Writing unit tests for a software system enhances the confidence that a system works as expected. Since time pressure often prevents a complete testing of all application details developers need to know which new tests the system requires. Developers also need to know which existing tests take the most time and slow down the whole development process. Missing feedback about less tested functionality and reasons for long running test cases make it, however, harder to create a test suite that covers all important parts of a software system in a minimum of time. As a result a software system may be inadequately tested and developers may test less frequently. Our approach provides test quality feedback to guide developers in identifying missing tests and correcting low-quality tests. We provide developers with a tool that analyzes test suites with respect to their effectivity (e.g., missing tests) and efficiency (e.g., time and memory consumption). We implement our approach, named Path Map, as an extended test runner within the Squeak Smalltalk IDE and demonstrate its benefits by improving the test quality of representative software systems.
Currently, several presentation files such as Slide Share and MPMeister are shared by many universities over the Web. These files are useful and valuable to students. However, such files have to be retrieved for self-learning purposes, and there is still a lack of support for self-learners browsing through slides containing information that might be irrelevant to their query. We describe a slide retrieval method involving the snippet generation of target slides, and we discuss how to present the retrieval results to users by considering what portions of the slides are relevant to a user query, on the basis of the relationships between slides. This method is based on (1) the keyword conceptual structure of the conceptual relationship that implicitly exists between keywords that are extracted from the slide text of the presentation content by Word Net and (2) the presentational structure of the indent levels in the slides. With our novel snippet-generation method, users can easily determine which slides to learn by browsing the relevant portions of the desired slides in the presentation and by focusing on portions from either detailed or generalized slides. We experimentally confirmed that our method enables the users to browse snippets of the retrieved slides efficiently and effectively.
The World Wide Web is the most powerful medium for information sharing and distribution in the history of humankind. The use of the Web is rapidly spreading into many new areas outside its original intended use, including its use as a platform for software applications. So far, a number of obstacles have hindered the development and deployment of full-fledged, truly interactive web applications. However, new emerging standards such as HTML5 and WebGL are removing the remaining limitations and transforming the Web into a real software platform. In this paper we argue that the trend towards web-based software will cause a paradigm shift in the software industry from binary applications to dynamically delivered web applications. In the future, the use of conventional binary programs will be limited to system software, whereas the vast majority of end user software will be developed using web technologies. All this will imply significant changes in the development, deployment and use of software, and open up interesting opportunities in software engineering research as well.
With the development of information technologies and increase scale of digital resources, personalized recommendation systems have come into the big picture of web2.0 technology. This paper proposed a graph-based recommendation algorithm using the user-resource rating data to construct a graph model and improves the model by adding user background information. The Random Walk with Restarts algorithm is applied to generate the final recommendation set. The improvement in accuracy on sparse data is illustrated by the experiments on the Movie Lens data set, comparing with the collaborative filtering algorithm.
How does a social network evolve? Sociologists have studied this question since 1930s. Some famous sociologists (for example, Scott Feld) concluded that a social network is composed of superposed cliques of different sizes, and a social network evolves in the form of clique superposition. However, sociologists didn't verify the theory in large scale data due to lack of computing ability. Motivated by this challenge, incorporated with the theory, we propose a Clique-superposition model for social networks. This model generates undirected weighted networks which obey earlier reported patterns and the new patterns observed in our study. The main contributions of this study include the following: (a) we discover a number of new patterns in undirected weighted social networks based on three large real world data sets, (b) we study the principle of social network evolution and propose a Clique-superposition model for social networks following our intuition, (c) we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that our model can generate networks with observed patterns, old and new.
Making sense of research community patterns can be a challenging task since they are often complex, dynamic, and inseparable from the "messiness" of the real world. This paper introduces a data-centric community mapping tool that extracts and visualizes research communities in Computer Science, based on the DBLP publication database [1]. Initial experiences with the community mapping tool suggest a possibility to facilitate the process of initiating cross-boundary research collaboration using multiple network structures.
In this paper, we present an application of affective computing as an art installation designed for group interaction. The Common Touch utilises a large multi-touch display, presenting interactive visualisations of emotive slogans. The artistic brief is to engage participants in the exploration, touching and manipulation of slogans. Participants reveal the missing words of slogans by touching them. The Common Touch utilises several input modalities to build an affective representation of the group interactions: emotional speech recognition, video feature extraction, multi-keyword spotting and touch events. The output of affective fusion is used to refine the selection of slogans presented. We include results of a series of experiments using The Common Touch with 24 subjects in groups of 3 using video analysis, logs and questionnaires for data collection. We describe, through interaction analysis, how users utilised the different modalities, suggesting implications for implementing multimodal aesthetic applications to support multi-user participation: tracking multi-user engagement, coverage of possible affective cues in each modality, multimodality in temporal and event analysis, dramaturgy and performative interaction.
Computers have played an important role in educating nations in the last two decades. Nevertheless, computers are still not very affordable, especially when compared to phones. Besides, users are usually required to be mature and skilled enough to use a computer. In this paper, we propose a VoIP solution thanks to which students below 10 years of age would be provided with services similar to those provided by a typical forum / blog. Due to their simplicity, blogs enhance collaboration among students. The challenge is to be able to offer a user-friendly solution that can be used by students of grades 4, 5, and 6. Through this audio forum / blog, a student can use an IP phone to post questions related to an academic topic. He/she will also be able to receive answers from a classmate. The goal of the study that we conducted is to check whether such an audio alternative can replace a visual device. This study also aims at checking if this replacement is efficient, easy to use, and productive.
This paper presents a study of the learning process in a distance collaborative learning environment with a chat system and a Wiki, and development of a new chat system based on the study. Collaborative learning as the combination of conversation and collaborative work was investigated, which revealed 1) There is a time lag between conversation and work, 2) Awareness of other learners is problematic in distance collaborative learning. Based on the investigation, an activity-aware chat system that indicates both conversation and work has been developed.
