Isaac Brewer

Developing a conceptual framework for visually-enabled geocollaboration

Most work with geospatial data, whether for scientific analysis, urban and environmental planning, or business decision making is carried out by groups. In contrast, geographic information technologies have been built and assessed only for use by individuals. In this paper we argue that, to support collaboration with geospatial information, specific attention must be given to tools that mediate understanding and support negotiation among participants. In addition, we contend that visual representations have a particularly important role to play as mediators of geocollaborative activities. With these contentions as a starting point, we present a framework for study of visually-enabled collaboration with geospatial information and for development, implementation, and assessment of geoinformation technologies that support that collaboration. The paper concludes with a brief description of two prototype geocollaborative environments that illustrate the use of the framework developed and provide the basis for discussing goals for futher research.

Geovisualization for knowledge construction and decision support

Geovisualization is both a process for leveraging the data resources to meet scientific and societal needs and a research field that develops visual methods and tools to support a wide array of geospatial data applications. While researchers have made substantial advances in geovisualization over the past decade, many challenges remain. To support real-world knowledge construction and decision making, some of the most important challenges involve distributed geovisualization - that is, enabling geovisualization across software components, devices, people, and places.

Designing a human-centered, multimodal GIS interface to support emergency management

Geospatial information is critical to effective, collaborative decision-making during emergency management situations; however conventional GIS are not suited for multi-user access and high-level abstract queries. Currently, decision makers do not always have the real time information they need; GIS analysts produce maps at the request of individual decision makers, often leading to overlapping requests with slow delivery times. In order to overcome these limitations, a paradigm shift in interface design for GIS is needed. The research reported upon here attempts to overcome analyst-driven, menu-controlled, keyboard and mouse operated GIS by designing a multimodal, multi-user GIS interface that puts geospatial data directly in the hands of decision makers. A large screen display is used for data visualization, and collaborative, multi-user interactions in emergency management are supported through voice and gesture recognition. Speech and gesture recognition is coupled with a knowledge-based dialogue management system for storing and retrieving geospatial data. This paper describes the first prototype and the insights gained for human-centered multimodal GIS interface design.

Speech-gesture driven multimodal interfaces for crisis management

Emergency response requires strategic assessment of risks, decisions, and communications that are time critical while requiring teams of individuals to have fast access to large volumes of complex information and technologies that enable tightly coordinated work. The access to this information by crisis management teams in emergency operations centers can be facilitated through various human-computer interfaces. Unfortunately, these interfaces are hard to use, require extensive training, and often impede rather than support teamwork. Dialogue-enabled devices, based on natural, multimodal interfaces, have the potential of making a variety of information technology tools accessible during crisis management. This paper establishes the importance of multimodal interfaces in various aspects of crisis management and explores many issues in realizing successful speech-gesture driven, dialogue-enabled interfaces for crisis management. This paper is organized in five parts. The first part discusses the needs of crisis management that can be potentially met by the development of appropriate interfaces. The second part discusses the issues related to the design and development of multimodal interfaces in the context of crisis management. The third part discusses the state of the art in both the theories and practices involving these human-computer interfaces. In particular, it describes the evolution and implementation details of two representative systems, Crisis Management (XISM) and Dialog Assisted Visual Environment for Geoinformation (DAVE/spl I.bar/G). The fourth part speculates on the short-term and long-term research directions that will help addressing the outstanding challenges in interfaces that support dialogue and collaboration. Finally, the fifth part concludes the paper.

Enabling collaborative geoinformation access and decision‐making through a natural, multimodal interface

Current computing systems do not support human work effectively. They restrict human–computer interaction to one mode at a time and are designed with an assumption that use will be by individuals (rather than groups), directing (rather than interacting with) the system. To support the ways in which humans work and interact, a new paradigm for computing is required that is multimodal, rather than unimodal, collaborative, rather than personal, and dialogue‐enabled, rather than unidirectional. To address this challenge, we have developed an approach for designing natural, multimodal, multiuser dialogue‐enabled interfaces to geographic information systems that make use of large‐screen displays and integrated speech–gesture interaction. After outlining our goals and providing a brief overview of relevant literature, we introduce the Dialogue‐Assisted Visual Environment for Geoinformation (DAVE_G). DAVE_G is being developed using a human‐centred systems approach that contextualizes development and assessment in the current practice of potential users. In keeping with this human‐centred approach, we outline a user task analysis and associated scenario development that implementation is designed to support (grounded in the context of emergency response), review our own precursors to the current prototype system and discuss how the current prototype extends upon past work, provide a detailed description of the architecture that underlies the current system, and introduce the approach implemented for enabling mixed‐initiative human–computer dialogue. We conclude with a discussion of goals for future research.

Collaborative geographic visualization: enabling shared understanding of environmental processes

We describe a prototype same-time/different-place collaborative geovisualization environment. We outline an approach to understanding use and usability and present results of interviews with domain experts about the ways in which collaborative visualization might enable groups to work at a distance. One goal for our research is to design an effective and flexible system that can support group work on environmental science research mediated through dynamic geovisualization displays. We are addressing this goal using a four-step human-centered system design process, modeled on that proposed by (Gabbard et al., 1999) for development and evaluation of virtual environments. The steps they delineate are: user task analysis; expert guideline-based evaluation; formative user-centered evaluation; and summative comparative evaluation.

The Neocities Simulation: Understanding the Design and Experimental Methodology Used to Develop a Team Emergency Management Simulation

This paper describes the continued development of a scaled-world simulation designed to conduct empirical research on team cognition and decision-making within a distributed environment. The NeoCITIES simulation was created to study decision-making and the impact of hidden knowledge profiles on team performance within a distributed command, control, and communications (C3) setting. NeoCITIES has been designed for the purpose of representing both new and operationally relevant scaled worlds, while emulating the complexities and attributes of emergent decision-making scenarios involving emergent counterterrorism events. Because patterns of activity emerge across time, knowledge is often hidden and disconnected within and across teams. NeoCIITES has been orchestrated to assess and evaluate the extent to which teams can socially construct knowledge while ineteracting through various means of technological support. Specifically, NeoCITIES is an interactive computer program designed to display information pertaining to events and occurrences in a virtual city space. The teams in the simulation represent three separate services (e.g., Police, Fire/EMS, and Hazmat) in which they must assess situations, interact and communicate according to their inter-team and intra-team roles, allocate resources in a timely manner, and make decisions within the context of emergency crisis management. Once NeoCITIES development has been completed, the simulation will be used as an experimental task to measure the impact of hidden knowledge profiles on teamwork and decision-making in the distributed team context.

Building a geocollaboratory: Supporting Human–Environment Regional Observatory (HERO) collaborative science activities

Abstract Collaboratories have been defined as centers without walls , virtual places where teams of scientists can undertake coordinated research. As part of the Human–Environment Regional Observatory (HERO) infrastructure project, we have been developing a geocollaboratory to support work by geographically distributed scientists about geographic problems. Our specific focus is on science teams developing and applying protocols for long-term study of the local and regional scale human impacts of global environmental change. The HERO geocollaboratory includes web and other Internet-based tools to enable same-time and different-time (thus synchronous and asynchronous) different-place collaboration. Methods and tools have been developed to support (1) synchronous distributed meetings that include video links and shared visual display of geospatial information; (2) asynchronous perspective comparison and consensus building activities; and (3) long-term information sharing and knowledge development. This paper introduces the research effort, sketches the conceptual framework within which the geocollaboratory is being developed, outlines progress thus far in the three collaboratory components listed above, and discusses our experiences using these tools for distributed science as well as our plans for continued development. We direct specific attention to three web-based, collaborative tools we have developed in support of components 2 and 3 above: an e-Delphi tool (supporting sharing and comparing of expert opinions), a concept-mapping tool that supports building, sharing, and comparing concept relationship diagrams linked to formal ontologies, and a web portal (called Codex) that provides a personal workspace, mechanisms for forming groups and accessing group resources, and methods for encoding knowledge objects that include geographic referencing.

Human-GIS interaction issues in crisis response

Geospatial information systems (GIS) provide a central infrastructure for computer supported crisis management in terms of database, analytical models and visualisation tools, but the user interfaces of such systems are still hard to use, and do not address the special needs of crisis managers who often work in teams and make judgements and decisions under stress. This paper articulates the overall challenges for effective GIS interfaces to support crisis management in three dimensions: immediacy, relevance and sharing. These three requirements are addressed by an integrated approach, taking a human-GIS interaction perspective. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, we cite our prototype system, DAVE_G (Dialogue-Assisted Visual Environment for Geoinformaton), as an example. DAVE_G uses a large screen display to create a shared workspace among team members, and allows risk managers to interact with a GIS through natural multimodal (speech/gesture) dialogues.

Multimodal interface platform for geographical information systems (GeoMIP) in crisis management

A novel interface system for accessing geospatial data (GeoMIP) has been developed that realizes a user-centered multimodal speech/gesture interface for addressing some of the critical needs in crisis management. In this system we primarily developed vision sensing algorithms, speech integration, multimodality fusion, and rule-based mapping of multimodal user input to GIS database queries. A demo system of this interface has been developed for the Port Authority NJ/NY and is explained here.