Carmen Mezura-Godoy

Towards social regulation in computer-supported collaborative work

Computer-based tools supporting collaborative work are becoming crucial elements to organize the activities of groups of people. Nevertheless, current tools do not enable users to incorporate social regulation aspects. In particular, it is not possible to set-up social rules (and the conditions to execute them) to control the interactions among the members of a workgroup. We explore the main issues on introducing social regulation in computer-supported collaborative work. Based on our regulation model, we propose an infrastructure enabling users to ease the development of regulated collaborative applications. The proposed infrastructure is composed by a framework of regulation components and a component management service.

Context-Aware Mobile Collaborative Systems: Conceptual Modeling and Case Study

A Mobile Collaborative System (MCOS) enable the cooperation of the members of a team to achieve a common goal by using a combination of mobile and fixed technologies. MCOS can be enhanced if the context of the group of users is considered in the execution of activities. This paper proposes a novel model for Context-Aware Mobile COllaborative Systems (CAMCOS) and a functional architecture based on that model. In order to validate both the model and the architecture, a prototype system in the tourism domain was implemented and evaluated.

MARS: Modelling Arenas to Regulate Collaborative Spaces

Social regulation is the process by which a workgroup create and negotiate rules controlling their collaborative activities. Although regulation is an intrinsic aspect of collaborative work, most existing contributions ignore it, and in the cases where regulation is considered, it is confined to a single workspace. This paper proposes the MARS regulation model which enables users to define their workspace (arena) and the rules governing it. A key feature of this model is that it allows one to create complex arenas by composing simple ones. In order to validate our approach, a java-based prototype supporting the MARS model has been implemented. This prototype ensures that the group activity is executed according to the current regulation.

Reasoning on expressive description logics with arithmetic constraints

Description logics (DL) is a well-known knowledge representation formalism. DL have been applied as reasoning framework in diverse domains, including the Semantic Web and Context-Aware Systems. It is an open question whether or not the expressive description logic ALCQIOreg is decidable. This logic is equipped with negation, conjunction, regular roles, inverse roles, nominals and qualified number restrictions. In this paper, we show this logic is decidable when interpreted over tree models. Moreover, it is shown that μALCTIO, which is known to be undecidable and that subsumes ALCQIOreg, is in EXPTIME in the case of tree models. μALCTIO generalizes regular roles with fixed-point constructors, and qualified number restrictions with arithmetic constraints. This EXPTIME bound holds even if the arithmetic constraints are coded in binary. Furthermore, we show that knowledge base reasoning, TBoxes and ABoxes, can also be decided in EXPTIME. These results are achieved via a polynomial reduction to the satisfiability problem of the propositional modal ¡-calculus extended with Presburger arithmetic constraints interpreted over tree models.

Towards a Context-Aware Framework for Improving Collaboration of Users in Groupware Systems

A Context-Aware Groupware System (CAGS) enables the members of a team to communicate, cooperate and coordinate their activities to achieve a common goal, by providing them tools that are aware of their current execution context and adapt accordingly. CAGS can be found in several domains such as entertainment, particularly Collaborative First-Person-Shooter (FPS) video games. In CAGS, the means of collaboration traditionally provided to users (e.g. text and audio messaging) are not necessarily adequate: for instance, in a FPS, messages can distract the gamer due to the speed of the game. This paper reports a study that, for Collaborative FPS, identifies advantages/disadvantages of current means of collaboration and social behaviors that arise when players interact face-to-face or remotely. Based on this study, a context-aware conceptual model and architecture is proposed for CAGS aimed to improve user collaboration.

Context-Aware Groupware Systems and Video Games: State of the Art

A Context-Aware Groupware System (CAGS) is software that enables the members of a team to communicate, cooperate and coordinate their activities in order to achieve a common goal, by providing them tools which are aware of their current execution context and adapt accordingly. CAGS are present in multiple domains (e.g. health, tourism), and particularly, in entertainment, collaborative videogames are a current topic of interest. This paper surveys the state of the art of CAGS, and particularly of Context-Aware Collaborative Video Games, in order to identify individual and social context information to be used by the next generation of collaborative systems.

A Tangible System for Learning Relational Algebra

Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) are those in which users interact with a digital system through the direct manipulation of physical objects (tokens). Tokens are directly linked to a certain data/functionality within the system, so manipulation of these objects affects the system behavior. This paper introduces TanQuery, a tangible system to support the process of learning Relational Algebra. TanQuery incorporates components to detect and track tokens, and to analyze and execute query trees. The system was tested by university students, and obtained results allowed to observe and analyze that students found this type of interface useful and pleasant. Keywords: Tangible user interfaces; relational algebra.

TanQuery: a tangible system for relational algebra learning

This paper introduces TanQuery, a tangible system prototype aimed to support the learning process of relational algebra (RA). In this system, RA operators and operands are represented by tokens that can be manipulated by the user to interactively create query trees. The design of TanQuery incorporates components to detect and track tokens, and to analyze and execute query trees. A working prototype has been developed and tested for usability. The results of prototype test, allow to observe that students found this type of interface pleasant, however, we need to make general improvements to prototype and realize further user studies.

Usability evaluation of collaborative applications with multimodal user interface

Software applications can be evaluated from a usability approach in terms of effectiveness efficiency and satisfaction. For the collaborative applications (CA) heuristics and evaluation methods have been proposed that can be applied in the different phases of the development of a CA. However there are no methods for evaluating AC with multimodal user interfaces. Therefore in this work we propose a form of evaluation from the perspective of usability for this type of applications. The proposal is based on usability heuristics and CA mechanisms (communication collaboration coordination and regulation). In order to validate the proposal a CA with multimodal interface that allows the elaboration of flow diagrams was evaluated.

Measuring Social Presence in groupware systems

Software developers have been recently interested in building next generation groupware systems that provide environments adaptable to various contexts of users, thus, offering information and services in a timely way depending on the developed activity. However, the existing solutions for building such systems are mostly limited to modeling and representing individual indicators, neglecting the importance of the social indicators. By contrast, in this paper we present a mechanism for designing and measuring an indicator called Social Presence (SP), which allows to represent the relevance of users when they are gradually participating in a collaborative activity. Thus, teams of users can be supported for decision-making with an indicator that mostly reflects teamwork and not only individual work. In order to propose this mechanism, we designed an algorithm to measure social presence from the results of the objectives and tasks associated to a collaborative activity. For evaluating this algorithm, we implemented an experiment with 24 users, which allowed us to obtain a dataset with team information from a groupware called AssaultCube - a collaborative First-Person-Shooter type videogame. The obtained results evidence that performance measurement on teams can still be improved.