Bogdan Dorohonceanu

TrafficView: a driver assistant device for traffic monitoring based on car-to-car communication

TrafficView is a device that can be embedded in the next generation of vehicles to provide drivers with a real-time view of the road traffic far beyond what they can physically see. Vehicles equipped with TrafficView devices disseminate traffic information using short-range wireless communication. The main benefits of disseminating traffic information in a vehicle-to-vehicle fashion are scalability and ease of deployment. The paper describes the TrafficView prototype and presents preliminary experimental results for this prototype.

The DISCIPLE system for collaboration over the heterogeneous Web

With the proliferation of mobile devices we witness an increasing demand for supporting collaboration among users working in the field and in the office. A key component for collaboration in this domain is sharing and manipulation of information using very different display capabilities on the diverse devices. We present a system based on a distributed repository of shared data objects and a client-server based infrastructure. The system is robust to intermittent connections, and a mixture of slow and fast links. To preserve bandwidth, application-specific data distribution agents decide what data to send to the clients. We also present a framework for building collaborative applications for clients with different display and processing capabilities. We describe example applications implemented both as Java applets to run in Web browsers and as Java spotlets to run on Palm OS based handheld computers. Using these applications we evaluated the framework and the results show that the framework is scaleable, offers good performance and has a high degree of code reusability.

A novel user interface for group collaboration

Flexible user interfaces that can be customized to meet the needs of the task at hand are particularly important for real-time group collaboration. This paper presents the user interface of the DISCIPLE (DIstributed System for Collaborative Information Processing and LEarning) system for synchronous groupware along with the multimodal human-computer interface enhancement. DISCIPLE supports sharing of JavaBeans-compliant components, i.e., beans and applets, which at runtime get imported into the shared workspace and can be interconnected into more complex components. As a result, importing various components allows user tailoring of the human-computer interface. We present a software architecture for customization of both group-level and application-level interfaces. The application-level interface includes a management system for sharing multiple modalities across concurrent applications. This multimodal management system is loadable on demand yet strongly embedded in the DISCIPLE framework to allow a pervasive multimodal user experience. This creates a very flexible user interface enabling the users to tailor it to their specific needs. Finally, we report the informal laboratory experience with the framework tested on a variety of applications and discuss its limitations.

Designing and examining PC to Palm collaboration

One trend in day-to-day computing involves moving seamlessly from large powerful workstations to small hand-held devices. A second trend is continuous collaboration with colleagues. Combining these trends requires solutions to both the problem of transferring large complex displays to smaller, less capable devices and of ensuring that a viable collaboration takes place even when the collaborators are using vastly different tools and viewing screen environments that differ significantly in their display richness. We briefly describe an architecture for managing displays across multiple platforms, which we call the Manifold framework. This architecture is incorporated into applications using our DISCIPLE collaboration system. We explore the use of Manifold by creating a 3D layout task that communicates with a 2D version of this task running on a Palm Pilot that is wirelessly connected to the Internet. In order to get measurable data on the collaboration problems and successes that users might encounter in this diverse communication tool arrangement, we ran two separate studies that captured the performance time, user errors and transcripts of the communication exchanges between the two users. We found that interface problems with each environment affected the task performance and that the different capabilities of the 3D and 2D environments created collaborative advantages rather than negatively affecting the collaboration.

Supporting Collaboration in Heterogeneous Environments

Heterogeneous sharing in synchronous collaboration is important with the proliferation of diverse computing environments, such as wearable computers and handheld devices. We present here a data-centric design for synchronous collaboration of users with heterogeneous computing platforms. Our approach allows clients with different capabilities to share different subsets of data in order to conserve communication bandwidth. We have built a robust middleware consisting of a distributed repository of shared data objects and a client-server-based infrastructure. Using the middleware, we have developed a framework for building collaborative applications for clients with different display and processing capabilities. We discuss the design and implementation of our middleware and framework and evaluate them by building four complex sample applications that demonstrate scalability, good performance, and high degree of code reusability.

Size Does Matter in Computer Collaboration: Heterogeneous Platform Effects on Human-Human Interaction

Because todays workforce is highly mobile, small wireless devices are being used to support mobile work collaboration. However, do computer platform differences affect such collaborations? This question is investigated through a controlled experiment that examines collaborative problem solving on different combinations of small and large computers. Experiment participants in the study work together on solving 2- and 3-dimensional variations of the popular Tetris™ game. Gender is used as a moderating variable to ascertain if prior observed effects on groups of males would be found among females. The findings indicate that platform differences affect communication and social behavior among both groups. Unexpectedly, collaboration amongst partners using small handhelds was the most cooperative and friendly because of the difficulty of solving the problem with the small device.