Collaborative business process modeling using 3D virtual environments

Process modeling is a complex organizational task that requires many iterations and communication between the business analysts and the domain specialists involved in the process modeling. The challenge of process modeling is exacerbated, when the process of modeling has to be performed in a cross-organizational, distributed environment. Some systems have been developed to support collaborative process modeling, all of which use traditional 2D interfaces. We present an environment for collaborative process modeling, using 3D virtual environment technology. We make use of avatar instantiations of user ego centres, to allow for the spatial embodiment of the user with reference to the process model. We describe an innovative prototype collaborative process modeling approach, implemented as a modeling environment in Second Life. This approach leverages the use of virtual environments to provide user context for editing and collaborative exercises. We present a positive preliminary report on a case study, in which a test group modelled a business process using the system in Second Life.

COLLABORATORY : characteristics of collaborative creativity

Teaching and learning in working groups is a challenge to both teacher and student. Collaboration is an elusive concept, difficult to teach, impossible to enforce, yet the ability to work in this way is an essential characteristic of any Creative Industries professional. In 2006, a group of creative industries students were charged with the task of collaboratively creating a performance as part of their coursework. This research project closely followed their development as agents of collaborative creativity using an innovative methodology which combined performance and documentary making. The result is COLLABORATORY - a DVD documentary isolating key behaviours and features of collaborative learning: Convergence and divergence of ideas, Characters and behaviours in collaboration, Leadership and facilitation, Motivation and Intersubjectivity. An engaging presentation of theory and practice capturing what Meill and Littleton (2004) call “the emotional dance of collaboration”.

The social role of design on collaborative destination branding : creating a new journey, a new story for the Waterfall Way, New South Wales, Australia.

This paper suggests that collaborative design can be an effective tool to promote social change. A co-design methodology and the results of its application in branding the Waterfall Way (New South Wales, Australia) as an eco- and nature-based tourism destination are presented as an example. The co-design exercise actively involved stakeholders in all stages of the design process, harnessing local tacit knowledge in relation to communication design, stimulating reflection upon what is special about the places, and consequently reinforcing a sense of belonging and the environmental and cultural conservation of place. The achieved results reflect the involvement and ownership of the community towards the design process. However, the application of a collaborative brand design methodology produced more than just a destination brand that is attractive to visitors, in line with local values, ways of living and the environment. It helped to catalyse a social network around tourism, triggering self-organising activity amongst stakeholders, who started to liaise with each other around the emergent regional identity - represented by the new brand they created together. The Waterfall Way branding process is a good example of social construction of shared understanding in and through design, showing that design exercises can have a significant social impact not only on the final product, but also on the realities of people involved in the process.

Rethinking health planning : a framework for organising information to underpin collaborative health planning

The field of collaborative health planning faces significant challenges created by the narrow focus of the available information, the absence of a framework to organise that information and the lack of systems to make information accessible and guide decision-making. These challenges have been magnified by the rise of the ‘healthy communities movement’, as a result of which, there have been more frequent calls for localised, collaborative and evidence-driven health related decision-making. This paper discusses the role of decision support systems as a mechanism to facilitate collaborative health decision-making. The paper presents a potential information management framework to underpin a health decision support system and describes the participatory process that is currently being used to create an online tool for health planners using geographic information systems. The need for a comprehensive information management framework to guide the process of planning for healthy communities has been emphasised. The paper also underlines the critical importance of the proposed framework not only in forcing planners to engage with the entire range of health determinants, but also in providing sufficient flexibility to allow exploration of the local setting-based determinants of health.

Detection and prevention of distributed denial of services attacks by collaborative effort of software agents, first prototype implementation

Distributed Denial of Services DDoS, attacks has become one of the biggest threats for resources over Internet. Purpose of these attacks is to make servers deny from providing services to legitimate users. These attacks are also used for occupying media bandwidth. Currently intrusion detection systems can just detect the attacks but cannot prevent / track the location of intruders. Some schemes also prevent the attacks by simply discarding attack packets, which saves victim from attack, but still network bandwidth is wasted. In our opinion, DDoS requires a distributed solution to save wastage of resources. The paper, presents a system that helps us not only in detecting such attacks but also helps in tracing and blocking (to save the bandwidth as well) the multiple intruders using Intelligent Software Agents. The system gives dynamic response and can be integrated with the existing network defense systems without disturbing existing Internet model. We have implemented an agent based networking monitoring system in this regard.

Collaborative voices: Ongoing reflections on cultural competency and the health care of Australian Indigenous people

The issue of cultural competency in health care continues to be a priority in Australia for health and human services professionals. Cultural competence in caring for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is of increasing interest, and is a priority in closing the gap in health disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Through a collaborative conversation, the authors draw on a case study, personal experience and the literature to highlight some of the issues associated with employing culturally appropriate, culturally safe and culturally competent approaches when caring for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The intent of this article is to encourage discussion on the topic of cultural competency, and to challenge health professionals and academics to think and act on racism, colonialism, historical circumstances and the political, social, economic, and geographical realms in which we live and work, and which all impact on cultural competency.

Community engagement and artful academic staff development : a return on expectations through collaborative practice

The changing ownership of roles in organisational work-life leads this paper to examine what universities are doing in their academic development practice through research at an Australian university where ‘artful’ collaboration with the real world aims to build capability for innovative academic community engagement. The paper also presents findings on the ‘return on expectations’ (Hodges, 2004) of community engagement for both academics and their organisational supervisors.

The Queensland Cancer Physics Collaborative and the Quantitative Biomedical Imaging & Characterisation (Q-BIC) Research Group

a presentation about immersive visualised simulation systems, image analysis and GPGPU Techonology

Publishing Engineering Education Resources: A Collaborative Web Project.

Web is a powerful hypermedia-based information retrieval mechanism that provides a user-friendly access across all major computer platforms connected over Internet. This paper demonstrates the application of Web technology when used as an educational delivery tool. It also reports on the development of a prototype electronic publishing project where Web technology was used to deliver power engineering educational resources. The resulting hyperbook will contain diverse teaching resources such as hypermedia-based modular educational units and computer simulation programs that are linked in a meaningful and structured way. The use of Web for disseminating information of this nature has many advantages that cannot possibly be achieved otherwise. PREAMBLE The continual increase of low-cost functionality available in desktop computing has opened up a new possibility in learning within a wider educational framework. This technology also is supported by enhanced features offered by new and ...

An architecture for user configurable mobile collaborative geographic applications

Geographic information is increasingly being touted for use in research and industrial projects. While the technology is now available and affordable, there is a lack of easy to use software that takes advantage of geographic information. This is an important problem because users are often researchers or scientists who have insufficient software skills, and by providing applications that are easier to use, time and financial resources can be taken from training and be better applied to the actual research and development work. A solution for this problem must cater for the user and research needs. In particular it must allow for mobile operation for fieldwork, flexibility or customisability of data input, sharing of data with other tools and collaborative capabilities for the usual teamwork environment. This thesis has developed a new architecture and data model to achieve the solution. The result is the Mobile Collaborative Annotation framework providing an implementation of the new architecture and data model. Mobile Collaborative Mapping implements the framework as a Web 2.0 mashup rich internet application and has proven to be an effective solution through its positive application to a case study with fieldwork scientists. This thesis has contributed to research into mobile computing, collaborative computing and geospatial systems by creating a simpler entry point to mobile geospatial applications, enabling simplified collaboration and providing tangible time savings.

A collaborative approach to home care delivery for older clients: Perspectives of home care providers

A collaborative approach to home care (HC) delivery for older clients has taken centre stage (Nies, 2006). In Finland, public home help and home health care services have been combined to form the home care unit, whose goal is to provide a collaborative approach to care delivery through cooperation and sharing of responsibilities. In this model, the general practitioner (GP), home care nurses (HCN) and home help workers (HHW) care for shared clients. GPs and HCNs provide health care, such as monitoring of clients’ health status, and HHWs assist with personal care tasks such as dressing, washing and meal preparation. As the needs of older clients are multiple, collaboration is needed as one professional group cannot take sole responsibility (Nies, 2006). This paper reports on a study undertaken to examine home care unit care providers’ perspectives of the collaborative approach to HC delivery for older clients.