Kelly A. Lyons

Virtual worlds - past, present, and future: New directions in social computing

Virtual worlds, where thousands of people can interact simultaneously within the same three-dimensional environment, represent a frontier in social computing with critical implications for business, education, social sciences, and our society at large. In this paper, we first trace the history of virtual worlds back to its antecedents in electronic gaming and on-line social networking. We then provide an overview of extant virtual worlds, including education-focused, theme-based, community-specific, children-focused, and self-determined worlds - and we analyze the relationship among these worlds according to an initial taxonomy for the area. Recognizing the apparent leadership of Second Life among todays self-determined virtual worlds, we present a detailed case study of this environment, including surveys of 138 residents regarding how they perceive and utilize the environment. Lastly, we provide a literature review of existing virtual world research, with a focus on business research, and a condensed summary of research issues in education, social sciences, and humanities.

ToXgene: a template-based data generator for XML

Synthetic collections of XML documents can be useful in many applications, such as benchmarking (e.g., Xmark [4], XOO7 [2]) and algorithm testing and evaluation. We present ToXgene, a template-based tool for facilitating the generation of large, consistent collections of synthetic XML documents. ToXgene was designed with the following requirements in mind: it should be declarative, to speed the data generation up; it should be general enough to generate fairly complex XML content and it should be powerful enough to capture the most common kinds of constraints in popular benchmarks. Preliminary experimental results show that our tool can closely reproduce the data sets for the Xmark and the TPC-H benchmarks [6]. The ToXgene Template Specification Language (TSL) is a subset of the XML Schema notation augmented with annotations for specifying certain properties of the intended data, such as probability distributions, the vocabulary for CDATA content, etc. We use XML Schema as the basis for TSL not only because it is a W3C standard, but also because it provides a more detailed description of XML documents than DTDs; in particular, it allows the specification of datatypes. We note that our tool gives the user total control over the data to be generated; thus, it is intended for the cases when the user knows the structure of the data she wants and requires the data to conform to this structure (however, we note that the structure does not have to be regular). The main features of our tool are:

Algorithms for Cluster Busting in Anchored Graph Drawing

Given a graph G and a drawing or layout of G, it is sometimes desirable to alter or adjust the layout. The challenging aspect of designing layout adjustment algorithms is to maintain a user’s mental picture of the original layout. We present a new approach to layout adjustment called cluster busting in anchored graph drawing. We then give two algorithms as examples of this approach. The goals of cluster busting in anchored graph drawing are to more evenly distribute the nodes of the graph in a drawing window while maintaining the user’s mental picture of the original drawing. We present simple and ecient iterative heuristics to accomplish these goals. We formally dene some measures of distribution and similarity and give empirical results based on these measures to quantify our methods. The theoretical analysis of our heuristics presents a formidable challenge, thus justifying our empirical analysis.

Towards a Framework for Evaluating Immersive Business Models: Evaluating Service Innovations in Second Life

Virtual worlds may be enabling technologies for the next generation of business models, practices and innovations in service. We situate our research within the field of service science and aim to evaluate service innovations. Because of Second Lifes visibility as the de facto virtual world for commerce, we apply an immersive business evaluation framework against existing and hypothetical Second Life innovations. We then develop a framework based on Media Richness and Task Closure Theories to evaluate these cases. We thus progress toward theories of immersive business and concomitant evaluative frameworks for immersive business models. We posit the following characteristics of potential Second Life innovations based on our analysis: 1) feedback and interactions between users are not dissipated; 2) tasks that are profitable enough to support can be started and closed by users within Second Life; and 3) users are compelled to form a social presence, which is then leveraged.

Enabling technology for distributed multimedia applications

In September 1993, the Canadian Institute for Telecommunications Research, in collaboration with the IBM Toronto Laboratory Centre for Advanced Studies, initiated a major project on broadband services. The goal of this major project is to provide the software technologies required for the development of distributed multimedia applications. Of particular interest are “presentational“ applications where multimedia documents, stored in database servers, are retrieved by remote users over a broadband network. Emphasis is placed on efficiency and service flexibility. By efficiency, we mean the ability to support many users and many multimedia documents. By service flexibility, we mean that the application is able to support a wide range of quality-of-service requirements from the users, adapt to changing network conditions, and support multiple document types. The research program consists of six constituent projects: multimedia data management, continuous media file server, quality-of-service negotiation and adaptation, scalable video encoding, synchronization of multimedia data, and project integration. These projects are investigated by a multidisciplinary team from eight institutions across Canada. Multimedia news has been selected as a target application for development, and the results from the various projects have been integrated into a multimedia news prototype. In this paper, the system architecture, research results, and the prototyping effort are presented.

Business Models in Emerging Online Services

Due to advances in technology and the rapid growth of online services, a significant number of new and inventive web-based service models and delivery methods have been introduced. Although online resources and services are having an impact on more traditional service delivery mechanisms, it is not yet clear how these emerging mechanisms for online service delivery will result in profitable business models. In this paper, we consider emerging business models for online services and their implications for how services are delivered, used, and paid for.We demonstrate the changing roles of user / consumer and provider / seller. We also discuss the applicability of different business models for various domains.

Leveraging social media to gather user feedback for software development

Social media is impacting the way service offerings are deployed and delivered. Several social media service offerings have emerged in the past few years (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn). At the same time, more traditional kinds of service offerings are finding creative ways of making use of social media techniques (e.g., Dell Community). In this research, we analyze how software companies are finding ways to use social media techniques to gather feedback from users collectively. The following four factors and the way they influence the use of social media are analyzed in depth: company size, transparency, software deployment, and number of social media tools in use. Results of our analysis of software vendors that gather collective user feedback in this way are presented, concluding with a discussion on which attributes influence the way social media is used for collecting user feedback.

Self-managing technology in IBM DB2 universal database

As the cost of both hardware and software falls due to technological advancements and economies of scale, the cost of ownership for database applications is increasingly dominated by the cost of people to manage them. Databases are growing rapidly in scale and complexity, while skilled database administrators (DBAs) are becoming rarer and more expensive. The scope of responsibility of DBAs is indeed daunting. This paper describes the self-managing technology in IBM DB2 Universal Database to illustrate how self-managing technology can enhance the usability of enterprise middleware and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Gamification of collaborative idea generation and convergence

Collaborative brainstorming does not always result in more ideas or higher quality ideas than working individually. We designed a system with game elements to incent participation in a collaborative creative idea generation processes of brainstorming followed by a convergence activity. We compared teams using the system with and without game elements to investigate the effect of the elements on collaborative work activities. Preliminary results suggest that game elements can help teams produce more ideas during brainstorming and engage in more discussion during a subsequent convergence activity, without negatively affecting idea quality.

Cooperative games and their effect on group collaboration

The potential for multiplayer computer games to serve as activities that can help increase interaction, cooperative tendencies and harmony in groups has been the subject of past research. However, there is still a long way to go before we can understand how positive group behavior and team dynamics in multiplayer games can impact real world collaboration. In our research work, we investigate this relationship further through Operation Sting, a cooperative multiplayer game we have designed to serve as an ice-breaker. Our goal is to study how participation in such a game affects collaboration in subsequent group work.