Carlos Eduardo Barbosa

Exploring many task computing in scientific workflows

One of the main advantages of using a scientific workflow management system (SWfMS) to orchestrate data flows among scientific activities is to control and register the whole workflow execution. The execution of activities within a workflow with high performance computing (HPC) presents challenges in SWfMS execution control. Current solutions leave the scheduling to the HPC queue system. Since the workflow execution engine does not run on remote clusters, SWfMS are not aware of the parallel strategy of the workflow execution. Consequently, remote execution control and provenance registry of the parallel activities is very limited from the SWfMS side. This work presents a set of components to be included on the workflow specification of any SWMfS to control parallelization of activities as MTC. In addition, these components can gather provenance data during remote workflow execution. Through these MTC components, the parallelization strategy can be registered and reused, and provenance data can be uniformly queried. We have evaluated our approach by performing parameter sweep parallelization in solving the incompressible 3D Navier-Stokes equations. Experimental results show the performance gains with the additional benefits of distributed provenance support.

GCC: a knowledge management environment for research centers and universities

Research centers and universities are knowledge-intensive institutions, where the knowledge creation and distribution are constant – and this knowledge should be managed. In spite of it, scientific work had been known for being solitary work, in which human interaction happened only in small groups within a research domain. Nowadays, due to technology improvements, scientific data from different sources is available, communication between researchers is facilitated and scientific information creation and exchange is faster than in the past. However, the focus on information exchange is too limited to create systems that enable true cooperation and knowledge management in scientific environments. To facilitate a more expressive exchanging, sharing and dissemination of knowledge and its management, we create a scientific knowledge management environment in which researchers may share their data, experiences, ideas, process definition and execution, and obtain all the necessary information to execute their tasks, make decisions, learn and disseminate knowledge.

Conceptual crowdsourcing models for e-learning

Crowdsourcing tools have improved e-learning over the last few years. However, these tools vary in many aspects. This work discusses and analyzes the basic e-learning processes based on these tools, defining ways to classify them through these processes. Finally, we define conceptual models tailored to each type of process, using a standard notation for software development. These conceptual models may be used to build new e-learning crowdsourcing tools.

Coordination, Communication, and Competition in eSports: A Comparative Analysis of Teams in Two Action Games

eSports are increasing in popularity and in importance worldwide and, given that they essentially involve the cooperation of teams competing among themselves, they are an interesting study object for the CSCW field. In this study, we contribute to the CSCW literature regarding eSports by performing a comparative analysis of two different action games, focusing on how cooperation, communication, and competition take place in each one of them. To do so, we perform a semi-qualitative study involving interviews with professional and amateur players. Then, we analyzed the results of the fieldwork, which consisted of a 31-question questionnaire with 65 valid respondents. Moreover, we discuss and highlight the relationship between our results and other CSCW-related works focusing on our research questions. Among our findings, we can highlight the specialization of work in different eSport teams, the importance of non-verbal communication during matches, and the interplay between competition and collaboration

MISIR: recommendation systems in a knowledge management scenario

In a scientific scenario we can notice the predominance of explicit knowledge being manipulated and distributed, which makes recommender systems very useful in this environment. But along with a knowledge management approach this kind of system can support the organisation in better identifying competences, help engage users in a continuous and dynamic knowledge exchange and customise knowledge dissemination as much as possible. MISIR is a collaborative recommender system, developed to help to the process of knowledge exchange. In this work we detail a collaborative recommender system which is used in a scientific knowledge management environment; we show how this approach can be aimed at a KM process and how this approach can deal with other kinds of knowledge used in research centres and universities.

Analyzing the collaborative aspects of the Future-oriented Technology Analysis

The Future-oriented Technology Analysis (FTA) literature recommends to use diversified FTA methods to improve the quality of the results. As the FTA methods are performed, the output of one method is used as an input of the next one. We propose that FTA methods rely on collaboration in order to produce the final result of the FTA. In this work, we analyze the collaboration applied to the FTA, from the collaboration among the researches when performing a method to the collaboration between the FTA methods. Finally, we also discuss the awareness of the collaborative work and how the FTA methods may support them.

Challenges on designing a distributed collaborative UML editor

Software development projects with geographically disperse teams, especially when use UML models for code generation, may gain performance by using tools with collaborative capabilities. This study reviews the distributed collaborative UML editors available in the literature. The UML Editors were compared using a Workstyle Model. Then, we discuss the fundamental challenges which these kind of UML Editors face to assist distributed developers and stakeholders across disperse locations.

Crowdsourcing Environments in E-Learning Scenario: A Classification Based on Educational and Collaboration Criteria

Recent crowd sourcing tools are changing the Education. However, each tool has a specific approach, business model and e-Learning goals. Due the increasing contribution of crowd sourcing in the e-Learning process, it has become important to study it and map the challenges intrinsic to this activity. This work discusses and classifies several crowd sourcing e-Learning tools that can be found in the Internet. We defined and used eleven dimensions to classify the 22 tools found, ranging from online Universities to marketplaces for online courses. The work contributions are: provide the first map the crowd sourcing tools and a framework for classify the future tools.

TransReport: collaborative supervision of the public transportation

The more cities grow, the more transportation systems face increasing pressure. Although Brazilian citizens have mostly used public transportation as a solution, Brazilian public transportation systems present serious quality problems. There are several solutions to the problems of public transportation, however, few initiatives are focused on supervising the quality of this service. Starting from the assumption that there is a lack of manpower to monitor the large number of vehicles of a big city, we propose the use of a new collaborative system to monitor and evaluate the quality of this service. Our system allows a multitude of users of the public transportation system to provide near real-time feedback to the problems occurring with these vehicles, giving to the managers and the entire population a better understanding of the problems regarding our public transportation. The proposed model of the system is a crowdsourcing alternative solution, with the advantage of being cheaper than sensors as well as more accurate than regular inspections. This article shows how we developed this system, how we surpass the other two existing systems in Brazil and what the first results were achieved with this system, entitled as TransReport.

WeCollaborate: Citizen collaboration for government problem-solving

The advance of technology has influenced the relationship between government and citizen. In this scenario, the convergence between digital democracy, crowd computing, information visualization, mining of social media and collaborative information systems can increase citizen participation in solution for social problems. The aim of this paper is to propose an application that provides a collaborative environment and allows citizens to help with the solutions of social problems. Expect that the application encourage the participation increase of citizens in decision-making of public sector. In proposal is described some features and the basic application architecture. Furthermore, in order to facilitate understanding was generated a prototype and a conceptual model of the application.