H. Andrés Neyem

Supporting group decision making and coordination in urban disasters relief efforts

When extreme events affect urban areas the response process should be fast and effective because the population and civil infrastructure densities potentially increase the impact of such events. These situations have shown the need to improve the group decisionmaking process and the coordination of relief activities carried out by relief organizations. This paper proposes to include first responders as decision makers and describes a technological platform to support decision making and coordination activities among these all actors involved. The supporting platform provides digital communication and information recording, representation and dissemination capabilities among the mobile workers participating in the relief efforts. The platform could also be used to support activities in scenarios similar to this one (e.g. police and military operations, massive social events).

A reusable structural design for mobile collaborative applications

Architecting mobile collaborative applications has always been a challenge for designers. However, counting on a structural design as a reference can help developers to reduce risks and efforts involved in system design. This article presents a reusable architecture which helps modeling the communication and coordination services required by mobile collaborative applications to support collaboration among users. This architecture has been used as a basis for the design of several mobile systems. Two of them are presented in this article to show the applicability of the proposal to real world collaborative systems.

Communication and coordination patterns to support mobile collaboration

Wireless communication and mobile computing technologies have brought new opportunities and challenges to the CSCW area. Traditional CSCW solutions concerning communication and coordination support are not applicable to mobile collaboration scenarios. Therefore, new reusable solutions have to be proposed in order to ease the development of mobile collaborative applications. This paper presents a set of design patterns to support communication and coordination in mobile ad-hoc scenarios. These two aspects are the basis to support mobile collaboration.

Supporting mobile collaboration with service-oriented mobile units

Advances in wireless communication and mobile computing extend collaboration scenarios. A current strategy to address productive, educational and social problems is to incorporate mobile workers using computing devices into work practices. Typically, collaborative applications intended to support mobile workers involve some type of centralized data or services. This situation constrains the collaboration capabilities, particularly in ad-hoc communication scenarios. We propose an autonomous software module able to provide and consume services from others units. We call it a Service-Oriented Mobile Unit (SOMU). A SOMU has been implemented as a middleware running on laptops and PDAs. Collaborative mobile applications developed on this middleware are then able to interact among them almost in any communication scenario. Availability of this tool is particularly relevant to support mobile collaboration when there is no stable communication support or no communication at all.

Building real-world ad-hoc networks to support mobile collaborative applications: lessons learned

Mobile collaboration is required in several work scenarios, i.e. education, healthcare, business and disaster relief. The features and capabilities of the communication infrastructure used by mobile collaborative applications will influence the type of coordination and collaboration that can be supported in real work scenarios. Developers of these applications are typically unaware of the constraints the communication infrastructure imposes on the collaborative system. Therefore, this paper presents an experimental study of how ad-hoc networks can effectively support mobile collaborative work. The article analyzes several networking issues and it determines how they influence the collaborative work. The paper also presents the lessons learned and it provides recommendations to deal with the networking issues intrinsic to adhoc networks.

General requirements to design mobile shared workspaces

Traditionally, collaborative systems have been difficult to conceive, design and implement. Although several requirements involved in these products are recurrent, some become invisible to clients and developers because they are part of the product back- end. This situation is worse in the case of mobile groupware because the general requirements to support mobile collaboration are still unclear. This paper presents a framework of general requirements that are usually present in mobile shared workspaces. These requirements are not always visible; therefore the framework acts as a checklist helping developers to consider them. Thus, the framework could increase the success probability of mobile shared workspaces.

Sharing information resources in mobile ad-hoc networks

Many people are sharing digital resources through networks in order to facilitate, enhance or improve collaborative work. Information sharing is not only important to support collaborative work but it also represents the basis for design and implementation of solutions for typical design aspects of groupware applications, such as: floor control, group memory, shared objects replication and sessions and users management. Advances in mobile technology have extended the sharing information scenarios to Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), which has brought new challenges. This paper presents a simple service platform to share information resources among members of a MANET-supported groupware session. People interact using notebooks and PDAs. In addition, a shared presentation tool which has been developed using the services of the platform is described. This presentation tool can be used to assist other collaborative activities, such as: technical presentations, casual interactions, meetings for decision making and software technical reviews.

Communication patterns to support mobile collaboration

The mobility of the collaborators, the diverse technologies available to support them and the continuous change in the collaboration scenarios bring new challenges to design, implement, and reuse communication software for these complex systems. This article presents a design patterns system to help modeling the communication services required to support mobile collaboration. These patterns serve as educational media for developers, students or researchers on how to design communication services for mobile collaborative applications. The patterns also foster the reuse of proven solutions.

Understanding presence awareness information needs among engineering students

The flexibility and changing nature of loosely coupled work makes presence awareness crucial to promote interactions among collaborators. Undergraduate students, in their efforts to accomplish coursework-related tasks, must deal with having several available channels to interact with others, accessing and sharing educational material, and the need to optimize their time. Most of them work in a loosely coupled way as the main strategy to reduce the effort spent in the educational process. Presence awareness may help them achieve interactions among potential collaborators in this scenario. This paper aims to identify the most suitable presence awareness information to promote on-demand interactions among college students. A study was conducted for this purpose, involving undergraduate engineering students from two universities in Chile. This article also presents a classification of presence awareness mechanisms for loosely-coupled mobile group work.

Supporting Mobile Virtual Team’s Coordination with SOA-Based Active Entities

The use of IT solutions to support preparedness, response and recovery process has been envisioned as a possible way to improve the support for collaboration among the actors participating in mobile teams operating under constrained scenarios. Software applications supporting mobility have typically been conceived as functional extensions of centralized enterprise systems hosted on corporate servers. However, in this work, we focus on those mobile scenarios which go one step further in terms of interoperability requirements. This proposal aims to support the design, deployment and execution of ad-hoc collaborative business processes (workflows) in mobile networks, operating under constrained conditions and taking advantage of the Active Entity (AE) concept.