Discovering the campus together: a mobile and computer-based learning experience

One of the most relevant difficulties faced by first-year undergraduate students is to settle into the educational environment of universities. This paper presents a case study that proposes a computer-assisted collaborative experience designed to help students in their transition from high school to university. This is done by facilitating their first contact with the campus and its services, the university community, methodologies and activities. The experience combines individual and collaborative activities, conducted in and out of the classroom, structured following the Jigsaw Collaborative Learning Flow Pattern. A specific environment including portable technologies with network and computer applications has been developed to support and facilitate the orchestration of a flow of learning activities into a single integrated learning setting. The result is a Computer-Supported Collaborative Blended Learning scenario, which has been evaluated with first-year university students of the degrees of Software and Audiovisual Engineering within the subject Introduction to Information and Communications Technologies. The findings reveal that the scenario improves significantly students’ interest in their studies and their understanding about the campus and services provided. The environment is also an innovative approach to successfully support the heterogeneous activities conducted by both teachers and students during the scenario. This paper introduces the goals and context of the case study, describes how the technology was employed to conduct the learning scenario, the evaluation methods and the main results of the experience.

Enabling Global Experiments With Interactive Reconfiguration And Steering By Multiple Users

In global scientific experiments with collaborative scenarios involving multinational teams there are big challenges related to data access, namely data movements are precluded to other regions or Clouds due to the constraints on latency costs, data privacy and data ownership. Furthermore, each site is processing local data sets using specialized algorithms and producing intermediate results that are helpful as inputs to applications running on remote sites. This paper shows how to model such collaborative scenarios as a scientific workflow implemented with AWARD (Autonomic Workflow Activities Reconfigurable and Dynamic), a decentralized framework offering a feasible solution to run the workflow activities on distributed data centers in different regions without the need of large data movements. The AWARD workflow activities are independently monitored and dynamically reconfigured and steering by different users, namely by hot-swapping the algorithms to enhance the computation results or by changing the workflow structure to support feedback dependencies where an activity receives feedback output from a successor activity. A real implementation of one practical scenario and its execution on multiple data centers of the Amazon Cloud is presented including experimental results with steering by multiple users.

05044-016 Upper Miller Creek Watershed Final Report

A water quality resource concern has come to the forefront in the Upper Miller Creek watershed in Black Hawk County after five to seven inches of rain fell on the area on May 22nd and 23rd of 2004 and unprecedented amounts of soil and organic debris were washed from cultivated areas, clogging most culverts and roadside ditches. The quantity of soil deposited in ditches gave a good indication of the amounts that were transported into the stream. The estimated total cost to Black Hawk County for cleanup and repair within the road right-of-way was $345,000. There were undetermined environmental costs incurred when the incredibly high volumes of soil washed from the fields into Miller Creek which flows directly into the Cedar River that is identified by the Department of Natural Resources as an impaired water body. The Upper Miller Creek Watershed Project is an innovative, collaborative project intended to meet a specific need identified by a local steering committee made up of concerned community agencies and local landowners. Led by the Soil and Water Conservation District and the Black Hawk County Board of Supervisors, the Miller Creek Watershed Project seeks to reduce soil erosion, improve water quality, and reduce county road infrastructure cost by implementing conservation practices, reducing nutrient and pesticide use and improving wildlife habitat.

Uniquitous internet middleware: architecture design and prototype evaluation

Technology advances in recent years have dramatically changed the way users exploit contents and services available on the Internet, by enforcing pervasive and mobile computing scenarios and enabling access to networked resources almost from everywhere, at anytime, and independently of the device in use. In addition, people increasingly require to customize their experience, by exploiting specific device capabilities and limitations, inherent features of the communication channel in use, and interaction paradigms that significantly differ from the traditional request/response one. So-called Ubiquitous Internet scenario calls for solutions that address many different challenges, such as device mobility, session management, content adaptation, context-awareness and the provisioning of multimodal interfaces. Moreover, new service opportunities demand simple and effective ways to integrate existing resources into new and value added applications, that can also undergo run-time modifications, according to ever-changing execution conditions. Despite service-oriented architectural models are gaining momentum to tame the increasing complexity of composing and orchestrating distributed and heterogeneous functionalities, existing solutions generally lack a unified approach and only provide support for specific Ubiquitous Internet aspects. Moreover, they usually target rather static scenarios and scarcely support the dynamic nature of pervasive access to Internet resources, that can make existing compositions soon become obsolete or inadequate, hence in need of reconfiguration. This thesis proposes a novel middleware approach to comprehensively deal with Ubiquitous Internet facets and assist in establishing innovative application scenarios. We claim that a truly viable ubiquity support infrastructure must neatly decouple distributed resources to integrate and push any kind of content-related logic outside its core layers, by keeping only management and coordination responsibilities. Furthermore, we promote an innovative, open, and dynamic resource composition model that allows to easily describe and enforce complex scenario requirements, and to suitably react to changes in the execution conditions.

VirtualECare: group support in collaborative networks organizations for digital homecare

Collaborative Work plays an important role in today’s organizations, especially in areas where decisions must be made. However, any decision that involves a collective or group of decision makers is, by itself complex, but is becoming recurrent in recent years. In this work we present the VirtualECare project, an intelligent multi-agent system able to monitor, interact and serve its customers, which are, normally, in need of care services. In last year’s there has been a substantially increase on the number of people needed of intensive care, especially among the elderly, a phenomenon that is related to population ageing. However, this is becoming not exclusive of the elderly, as diseases like obesity, diabetes and blood pressure have been increasing among young adults. This is a new reality that needs to be dealt by the health sector, particularly by the public one. Given this scenarios, the importance of finding new and cost effective ways for health care delivery are of particular importance, especially when we believe they should not to be removed from their natural “habitat”. Following this line of thinking, the VirtualECare project will be presented, like similar ones that preceded it. Recently we have also assisted to a growing interest in combining the advances in information society - computing, telecommunications and presentation – in order to create Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS). Indeed, the new economy, along with increased competition in today’s complex business environments, takes the companies to seek complementarities in order to increase competitiveness and reduce risks. Under these scenarios, planning takes a major role in a company life. However, effective planning depends on the generation and analysis of ideas (innovative or not) and, as a result, the idea generation and management processes are crucial. Our objective is to apply the above presented GDSS to a new area. We believe that the use of GDSS in the healthcare arena will allow professionals to achieve better results in the analysis of one’s Electronically Clinical Profile (ECP). This achievement is vital, regarding the explosion of knowledge and skills, together with the need to use limited resources and get better results.

Measurement of Entrepreneurial Dynamism Capabilities and Performance in Collaborative Networks

Part 16: Performance Measurement Systems

INNOVATIVE HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTIONS TO SUPPORT COGNITIVE COLLABORATIVE GEOSPATIAL ENVIRONMENTS

In the current world geospatial information is being demanded in almost real time, which requires the speed at which this data is processed and made available to the user to be at an all-time high. In order to keep up with this ever increasing speed, analysts must find ways to increase their productivity. At the same time the demand for new analysts is high, and current methods of training are long and can be costly. Through the use of human computer interactions and basic networking systems, this paper explores new ways to increase efficiency in data processing and analyst training.

Sustainable pavements for rural scenarios: laboratory and in-situ characterization of recycled materials and innovative construction solutions

Growing need for infrastructure has led to expanding research on advances in road pavement materials. Finding solutions that are sustainable, environmentally friendly and cost-efficient is a priority. Focusing such efforts on low-traffic and rural roads can contribute with a significant progress in the vital circulatory system of transport for rural and agricultural areas. An important alternative material for pavement construction is recycled aggregates from solid wastes, including waste from civil engineering activities, mainly construction and demolition. A literature review on studies is made; it is performed a planned set of laboratory testing procedures aimed to fully characterize and assess the potential in-situ mechanical performance and chemical impact. Furthermore, monitoring the full-scale response of the selected materials in a real field construction site, including the production, laying and compaction operations. Moreover, a novel single-phase solution for the construction of semi-flexible paving layers to be used as alternative material to common concrete and bituminous layers is experimented and introduced, aiming the production and laying of a single-phase laid material instead of a traditional two phases grouted macadam. Finally, on a parallel research work for farming pavements, the possible use of common geotechnical anti-erosive products for the improvement of soil bearing capacity of paddock areas in cattle husbandries of bio-farms is evaluated. this thesis has clearly demonstrated the feasibility of using the sustainable recycled aggregates for low-traffic rural roads and the pavements of farming and agriculture areas. The pavement layers constructed with recycled aggregates provided satisfying performance under heavy traffic conditions in experimental pavements. This, together with the fact that these aggregates can be available in most areas and in large quantities, provides great impetus towards shifting from traditional materials to more sustainable alternatives. The chemical and environmental stability of these materials proves their soundness to be utilized in farming environments.

A Service Integration Platform for Collaborative Networks

Integrated manufacturing constitutes a complex system made of heterogeneous information and control subsystems. Those subsystems are not designed to the cooperation. Typically each subsystem automates specific processes, and establishes closed application domains, therefore it is very difficult to integrate it with other subsystems in order to respond to the needed process dynamics. Furthermore, to cope with ever growing marketcompetition and demands, it is necessary for manufacturing/enterprise systems to increase their responsiveness based on up-to-date knowledge and in-time data gathered from the diverse information and control systems. These have created new challenges for manufacturing sector, and even bigger challenges for collaborative manufacturing. The growing complexity of the information and communication technologies when coping with innovative business services based on collaborative contributions from multiple stakeholders, requires novel and multidisciplinary approaches. Service orientation is a strategic approach to deal with such complexity, and various stakeholders' information systems. Services or more precisely the autonomous computational agents implementing the services, provide an architectural pattern able to cope with the needs of integrated and distributed collaborative solutions. This paper proposes a service-oriented framework, aiming to support a virtual organizations breeding environment that is the basis for establishing short or long term goal-oriented virtual organizations. The notion of integrated business services, where customers receive some value developed through the contribution from a network of companies is a key element.

Entorns col•laboratius virtuals asíncrons basats en Web i enfocats en la gestió del coneixement = Web-based Asynchronous Collaborative Environments Focused on Knowledge Management

Report for the scientific sojourn at the University of California at Berkeley, USA, from september 2007 until july 2008. Communities of Learning Practice is an innovative paradigm focused on providing appropriate technological support to both formal and especially informal learning groups who are chiefly formed by non-technical people and who lack of the necessary resources to acquire such systems. Typically, students who are often separated by geography and/or time have the need to meet each other after classes in small study groups to carry out specific learning activities assigned during the formal learning process. However, the lack of suitable and available groupware applications makes it difficult for these groups of learners to collaborate and achieve their specific learning goals. In addition, the lack of democratic decision-making mechanisms is a main handicap to substitute the central authority of knowledge presented in formal learning.

Remote collaborative multi-user informal learning experiences: design and evaluation

This paper presents a customizable system used to develop a collaborative multi-user problem solving game. It addresses the increasing demand for appealing informal learning experiences in museum-like settings. The system facilitates remote collaboration by allowing groups of learners tocommunicate through a videoconferencing system and by allowing them to simultaneously interact through a shared multi-touch interactive surface. A user study with 20 user groups indicates that the game facilitates collaboration between local and remote groups of learners. The videoconference and multitouch surface acted as communication channels, attracted students’ interest, facilitated engagement, and promoted inter- and intra-group collaboration—favoring intra-group collaboration. Our findings suggest that augmentingvideoconferencing systems with a shared multitouch space offers newpossibilities and scenarios for remote collaborative environments and collaborative learning.

Collaborative explicit plasticity framework: a conceptual scheme for the generation of plastic and group-aware user interfaces

The advent of new advances in mobile computing has changed the manner we do our daily work, even enabling us to perform collaborative activities. However, current groupware approaches do not offer an integrating and efficient solution that jointly tackles the flexibility and heterogeneity inherent to mobility as well as the awareness aspects intrinsic to collaborative environments. Issues related to the diversity of contexts of use are collected under the term plasticity. A great amount of tools have emerged offering a solution to some of these issues, although always focused on individual scenarios. We are working on reusing and specializing some already existing plasticity tools to the groupware design. The aim is to offer the benefits from plasticity and awareness jointly, trying to reach a real collaboration and a deeper understanding of multi-environment groupware scenarios. In particular, this paper presents a conceptual framework aimed at being a reference for the generation of plastic User Interfaces for collaborative environments in a systematic and comprehensive way. Starting from a previous conceptual framework for individual environments, inspired on the model-based approach, we introduce specific components and considerations related to groupware.

Does absorptive capacity determine collaborative research returns to innovation? A geographical dimension

This paper aims to estimate the impact of research collaboration with partners in different geographical areas on innovative performance. By using the Spanish Technological Innovation Panel, this study provides evidence that the benefits of research collaboration differ across different dimensions of the geography. We find that the impact of extra-European cooperation on innovation performance is larger than that of national and European cooperation, indicating that firms tend to benefit more from interaction with international partners as a way to access new technologies or specialized and novel knowledge that they are unable to find locally. We also find evidence of the positive role played by absorptive capacity, concluding that it implies a higher premium on the innovation returns to cooperation in the international case and mainly in the European one.

Fostering Collaborative Knowledge Building by the Effective Provision of Knowledge about the Discussion Process

Peer-reviewed

Engendering Group Support Based Foresight for Capital Intensive Manufacturing Industries - Case Paper and Steel Industry Scenarios by 2018

In recent times of global turmoil, the need for uncertainty management has become ever momentous. The need for enhanced foresight especially concerns capital-intensive industries, which need to commit their resources and assets with long-term planning horizons. Scenario planning has been acknowledged to have many virtues - and limitations - concerning the mapping of the future and illustrating the alternative development paths. The present study has been initiated to address both the need of improved foresight in two capital-intensive industries, i.e. the paper and steel industries and the imperfections in the current scenario practice. The research problem has been approached by engendering a problem-solving vehicle, which combines, e.g. elements of generic scenario process, face-to-face group support methods, deductive scenario reasoning and causal mapping into a fully integrated scenario process. The process, called the SAGES scenario framework, has been empirically tested by creating alternative futures for two capital-intensive industries, i.e. the paper and steel industries. Three scenarios for each industry have been engendered together with the identification of the key megatrends, the most important foreign investment determinants, key future drivers and leading indicators for the materialisation of the scenarios. The empirical results revealed a two-fold outlook for the paper industry, while the steel industry future was seen as much more positive. The research found support for utilising group support systems in scenario and strategic planning context with some limitations. Key perceived benefits include high time-efficiency, productivity and lower resource-intensiveness. Group support also seems to enhance participant satisfaction, encourage innovative thinking and provide the users with personalised qualitative scenarios.