Adriana Santarosa Vivacqua

i-ProSE

Scientific environments are known for being highly dynamic, subject to rapid evolution and demanding constant renewal and update. Additionally, science is a highly social arena. However, interpersonal collaboration and knowledge flow in scientific environments are usually more restricted. Collaboration is intense among small groups of people working on specific problems within a domain, but low between groups. As user profiling has been extensively used as a basis for recommendation, personalization and matchmaking systems, a better profile identification can improve interaction levels among researchers belonging to the same domain but working in different laboratories. Profiles may be constructed in two ways: either through explicit declaration by the user or through the observation of users’ actions. Many systems employ one approach to the exclusion of the other. We contend that a combined approach will yield better results, especially on scientific scenario, providing a mix of declared and inferred information. In this article, we present inference-based profiles in scientific environments (i-ProSE), an integrated system that dynamically creates and maintains scientific user profiles based both on declared information and on observed behaviour. The i-ProSE can be used to locate experts, deliver content, build communities, find collaborators for long-term projects or detect instantaneous opportunities for informal collaboration, which is presented with a short study case.

Peer-to-peer collaborative editing of ontologies

In This work we present COE, a peer-to-peer collaborative ontology editor, which supports creation, edition, sharing, and reuse of ontologies. COE was implemented on top of a general-purpose peer-to-peer framework, COPPEER. Ontologies are particularly useful as a design tool because they render the communication between people and the interoperability between systems easier. In large multidisciplinary design projects, ontologies can be a critical success factor. The collaborative creation of ontologies allows for better understanding among participants of a project and economy of resource among projects. Meanwhile, a P2P approach is expected to enable new modes of collaboration.

From data to knowledge mining

Abstract Most past approaches to data mining have been based on association rules. However, the simple application of association rules usually only changes the users problem from dealing with millions of data points to dealing with thousands of rules. Although this may somewhat reduce the scale of the problem, it is not a completely satisfactory solution. This paper presents a new data mining technique, called knowledge cohesion (KC), which takes into account a domain ontology and the users interest in exploring certain data sets to extract knowledge, in the form of semantic nets, from large data sets. The KC method has been successfully applied to mine causal relations from oil platform accident reports. In a comparison with association rule techniques for the same domain, KC has shown a significant improvement in the extraction of relevant knowledge, using processing complexity and knowledge manageability as the evaluation criteria.

Assisting meeting facilitation through automated analysis of group dynamics

In many group work situations, meetings take up a reasonable amount of time. Several techniques have been introduced to streamline meetings and reach conclusions faster, many of which place an individual in the role of meeting facilitator. Facilitation involves intervening to produce desired results. Thus, a facilitator should be able to identify certain group dynamics and act accordingly. In this paper, we present and electronic idea generation system based on thinkLets dynamics and designed to measure group dynamics. This information is provided to the facilitator so he or she can decide whether or not to intervene.

Information Needs for Meeting Facilitation

In many group work settings, meetings take up a reasonable amount of time and often do not achieve satisfactory outcomes. One of the techniques that has been introduced to ensure meetings run smoothly and reach their goals places an individual in the role of meeting facilitator. Facilitation involves putting together the meeting agenda, designing meeting dynamics and overseeing the meeting at run time, to ensure goals are met. This may involve intervening or adjusting meeting structure to produce desired results. Thus, a facilitator should be able to act according to perceived group dynamics or problems. In this paper, we investigate information needs during facilitation activities. Our goal is to be able to construct systems that provide information to the facilitator so he or she can decide when to act and what to do.

Does conference participation lead to increased collaboration? A quantitative investigation

Conferences are an important environment for academic knowledge exchange, and are valued by researchers as a good way to increase ones social network and meet potential collaborators. The question we investigate in this work is whether conferences actually influence collaboration between researchers, providing a starting point for joint work. To conduct this investigation, we used the DBLP database containing 640.977 distinct authors, 1.057.207 papers published in 21.354 journals and conferences spanning over more than 70 years. Using the concept of coauthorship as evidence of collaboration, we found that at best only 123.886 collaborations (from a total of 2.685.224, or 4,61%) could have emerged from the authors having met at a conference. This leads us to the conclusion that conference environments do not significantly promote collaboration among participants.

CUMBIA: an agent framework to detect opportunities for collaboration

With the increase in adoption of remote work groups and teams working in non-collocated environments, several opportunities for interaction have been lost. Contact with colleagues and discovery of opportunities, previously easy due to physical proximity, is made harder with distance. In this paper, we describe an agent-based framework to assist users in finding opportunities for interaction that may have been overlooked.

Troubleshooting collaborative ontology design

This paper presents observations from engineering ontology design sessions. We followed the entire design process of a group of engineers building an ontology for root cause analysis to be applied to petroleum pump failure diagnosis. The group was composed of experts with same background, who work in different locations of the same company. Even though they apparently share similar analysis methods, during meetings discrepancies emerged. Different points of view were argued and decisions were made at the end of each meeting. Given the final product acceptance problems, we look back at each meeting and attempt to identify the reasons that led to this unfortunate and common outcome. Understanding the problem enables us to draw a set of guidelines for empowering design meetings with simple technologic methods for improving group final artifact acceptance; therefore diminishing re-work. Our observations point towards (1) a correlation between designers behavior and future artifact acceptance; (2) a set of actions that interrupts or brings back group attention; and (3) a metric for evaluating group design meetings. We believe our findings may guide software developers to tools for supporting group design.

A Framework to Support Self-Governing Software Design Groups

Decentralized projects, where several organizations come together to work on a joint project, are quickly becoming the norm, due to increased networking and distribution. Subcontracting and consulting lead to the creation of more flexible, less hierarchical structures. In these networked structures, partners are often considered as peers and the group has the flexibility to restructure itself according to its needs. In this paper, we present a study of a decentralized software research, design and development group, and discuss its needs. A large amount of time is spent with articulation and maintaining partners up-to-date, which suggests that appropriate awareness support might facilitate the groups activities

Ontology Based Design for Similarity Discovery in SYMBAD Project

The SYMBAD (Similarity Based Agents for Design) system is a project developed to aid architectural design team members to share knowledge used in stand design. Stands play important role in promoting a company image, projects its presence and emphasizes the corporate identity in events and fairs. The processes and problems in stand projects are quite common and can be easily found in other design situations. From conceptual design to the construction of a final product, a stand project passes through many hands, each one adding bits and pieces until it is completed. The physical distance, difficulties in communication and cultural aspects make designers interact less than necessary, generating problems in all phases of the design activities. The SYMBAD project uses an ontology based framework to improve process awareness in a design activity. Based on the knowledge kept from previous projects and similarity aspects, agents can identify possibilities for reuse and provide information to help the design team to built new stands using past materials and ideas. Through a constructed ontology and collaborative features agents can produce global awareness, to facilitate later steps and optimize the process as a whole. In this paper we present some of the junctions and architecture aspects, as well as some of the implementations choices made for this project