Mauro Carlos Pichiliani

A Guide to Map Application Components to Support Multi-User Real-Time Collaboration

Building a collaborative application from scratch is a hard task. In the last decade many advances have been made to help the developers to construct collaborative applications, however little effort has been made to extend existing single-user applications to support real-time collaboration. This work presents a mapping from the main components of an existing single-user model-view-controller based application to multiuser real-time components of the collaborative application. The mapping allows reuse of existing single-user components by facilitating the construction of collaborative applications. This paper describes the mapping, the extension of an existing single-user application and discusses an experiment of the prototype application where the mapping was applied

Towards Incremental Separation of Surmountable and Insurmountable Programming Difficulties

In an offering of CS 1, we monitored the amount of help students in a class received through various means. We found that most students wanted help that went beyond office hours and email, and that for the vast majority of them, their grades correlated positively with the amount of help they received. However, increasing help also requires increasing instructional resources unless techniques can be found to separate the surmountable difficulties from the insurmountable ones. We have developed such a technique that looks at individual interaction logs and classifies difficulties incrementally as they occur. The insight behind the technique is that when students face surmountable difficulties, they tend to repeat certain action sequences, which can be detected to distinguish the surmountable difficulties from the insurmountable ones. A lab study shows that the mechanism gives significantly better results than the baselines.

Experimental art with brain controlled interface

This essay presents experimental computer artworks using Brain Controlled Interface (BCI). It points to a preliminary contextualization and general development emphasizing affective, sensory, poetic and aesthetic experiences intermediated by mindware devices. BCI offers a new research art field using a low-cost neuro system to explore human minds untapped potential. A BCI for a Java3D framework allowed to arrive at the concept of exoendogenous interactivity. The main contribution of this essay is the novel use of affective quantified data to provide emotional feedback to computers and participants while experimenting an art piece, intertwining human affective states with computational autonomous processes. May one say that computer agents, by capturing world percepts, perceive the human mind activity? Possible answers to this question may open poetic and aesthetic research fields for artists, leading to a better understanding of how computers collect and respond to emotional states within human minds.

Exploring a Brain Controlled Interface for Emotional Awareness

Emotions play an important role in human interaction, communication, coordination, and cooperation. The perception of emotional and affective state in present and past groups activities is a relevant issue since emotional awareness influence the outcome of cooperative work. While there is a growing interest in providing computational support for recognition and representation of emotions, few research efforts explore the potential of Brain Controlled Interfaces (BCI) to collect and present emotional awareness in synchronous collaborative systems. In this paper, we present an initial step in exploring how a low-cost off-the-shelf electroencephalograph (EEG) system can be used to provide emotional awareness information in synchronous collaborative editing systems.

A technical comparison of the existing approaches to support collaboration in non-collaborative applications

Many approaches can be used to facilitate the implementation of collaborative requirements in noncollaborative applications. In general, each approach uses different design techniques and has specific objectives and pre-conditions. During the implementation of collaborative requirements, it is not always easy to decide which approach is recommended i.e. which criteria should be used to compare the approaches. Based on the literature, this paper presents a set of criteria to technically compare the existing approaches to support collaborative requirements in non-collaborative applications. The criterion help developers in the task of choosing the most suitable approach to develop collaborative applications based on non-collaborative applications.

TeleEye: An Awareness Widget for Providing the Focus of Attention in Collaborative Editing Systems

Awareness is the knowledge about present and past group’s activities and it is a relevant issue for cooperative work. There are many devices that supply awareness information in synchronous collaborative editing systems. However, the current awareness devices have restrictions to both accomplish effective awareness and show the focus of attention identifying the exact place of the participants’ attention. This paper presents an awareness widget for synchronous collaborative editing systems called TeleEye that provides information about the localization of the participants’ attention during a collaborative session by means of eye tracking.

Analyzing the use of VoIP technology in collaborative modeling

Collaborative Editing Systems often use communication channels in order to make the collaboration more effective. In this work, we present a case study of pair communication using audio via VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology during collaborative modeling sessions. The study provides an analysis of audio and textual chat as communication medium and presents data on usage patterns, user interaction and attitudes when using collaborative editing systems. The qualitative and quantitative analysis suggests that VoIP technology does have advantages over textual chat in collaborative modeling when used for communication.

Usability Requirements for the Development and Evaluation of Mobile Groupware Systems

Usability is an important factor affecting the users productivity. However, evaluating groupware usability is a complex task, especially in a mobile environment. In this paper a study with eight requirements to explore usability in a mobile groupware environment is presented. A prototype application was developed followed by a series of evaluations to observe the potential of the requirements. Results show that these requirements should be considered during the development of a mobile groupware in order to help designers to identify usability weaknesses in a mobile groupware.

Lacomo: A Layer to Develop Collaborative Mobile Applications

Nowadays, there is little support for developers to transform single user applications to collaborative ones in the mobile domain. We present Lacomo, a new software layer to build collaborative mobile applications with accessibility, screen sharing, and application rewriting technologies that reduce costs to prototype collaboration features, thereby increasing the range of supported applications without deep application knowledge. We compare it to an ad hoc approach. Users using Lacomo performed a testing task faster, with less effort and errors at a higher completion time. 1. General Information Mobile applications are a major force behind the explosive growth of mobile devices. While they greatly extend the functionality of those devices, they also open opportunities to enable collaboration, especially with applications familiar to users. Leveraging single-user commercial systems to multi-user collaboration has been a persistent research topic, since most applications do not have collaborative features. Also, mobile apps such as Draw Something achieved high popularity leading us to conjecture that modify and adapt existing mobile application to support synchronous collaboration has potential to reach many users. However, related research academic work and the state of the practice approaches pay little attention to the mobile domain, and the approaches that do so either focus in resources that demand high development effort or do not cope with specific characteristics of mobile devices. To overcome the above limitations, we propose a Layer to develop collaborative mobile applications (Lacomo). Inspired by operating system’s accessibility layers, our approach has the goal to promote collaboration through data sharing in user interface widgets found in existing applications, such as text box and buttons. This is a contrast to traditional approaches to alleviate development through source code modification, component placement, or framework reuse. We envisioned Lacomo as a mobile prototyping approach, which means its usage should be aligned with the states of software development that address collaborative requirements into their projects either a single-user application that will receive collaboration features or a new application build from the start. Lacomo is designed to be built on top of an API that capture user events, such as the accessibility API, thus any existing application that has widgets compatible with accessibility interfaces can benefits from its features. The services developed with Lacomo can access events and data associated with elements of the UI interface without application source code in the same way as any accessibility service. Additionally, since Lacomo services can access the Operational System (OS) System log, every communication from the application to the OS and vice-versa is available to the Lacomo layer. The hierarchy of objects that corresponds to UI is available to the developer using callbacks and every pixel shown is reachable due to screen sharing technology. These features achieve a high level of code reuse since they are available at run time and do not require the source code. We conducted a user study to compare the Lacomo implementation with the ad hoc to provides non-WYSIWIS collaboration in an existing mobile application. Formally, this experiment aims to collect quantitative and qualitative evidence to verify the following hypothesis: Does the use of Lacomo require less effort to modify an existing mobile application than the ad hoc technique? 20 participants (2 female, 18 male), with age ranging from 22 to 53, participated in the experiments that recorded Time, LOC (Lines of Code), LOC divided by time, Calories, Mouse movements and Save events (Figure 1. Figure 1. Normalized values of the effort metrics. The effort required to change a mobile app to support collaborative requirements using the event notification approach compared to ad hoc implementation has lower effort metric values. We compared Lacomo with the ad hoc approach because to date the is no other automatic approach to convers single-user applications to collaborative ones in the mobile context. Also, the result of the analysis of the changes made by the user support the fact that the complexity is lower than the ad hoc approach. In general, participants commented that the Lacomo approach was interesting. When asked about the difficulty they faced, participants of the ad hoc group reported problems to understand the application code and to capture events. These findings were obtained from the analysis of the qualitative data gathered from pos-task interviews. Reference: Pichiliani, Mauro C.; Dewan, Prasun; Hirata, Celso M. (2018): Lacomo: A Layer to Develop Collaborative Mobile Applications. In: Proceedings of 16th European Conference on ComputerSupported Cooperative Work Demos and Posters, Reports of the European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies (ISSN 2510-2591), DOI: 10.18420/ecscw2018_p4.

Exploring the Impact of Video on Inferred Difficulty Awareness

An important issue in many forms of collaboration technology is how video can help the technology better meet its goals. This paper explores this question for difficulty awareness, which is motivated by academic and industrial collaboration scenarios in which unsolicited help is offered to programmers in difficulty. We performed experiments to determine how well difficulty can be automatically inferred by mining the interaction log and/or videos of programmers. Our observations show that: (a) it is more effective to mine the videos to detect programmer postures rather than facial features; (b) posturemining benefits from an individual model (training data for a developer is used only for that developer), while in contrast, log-mining benefits from a group model (data of all users are used for each user); (b) posture-mining alone (using an individual model) does not detect difficulties of “calm” programmers, who do not change postures when they are in difficulty; (c) log-mining alone (using a group model) does not detect difficulties of programmers who pause interaction when they are either in difficulty or taking a break; (d) overall, log-mining alone is more effective than posture-mining, alone; (e) both forms of mining have high false negative rates; and (g) multimedia/multimodal detection that mines postures and logs using a group model gives both low false positive and negatives. These results imply that (a) when collaborators can be seen, either directly or through a video, posture changes, though idiosyncratic, are important cues for inferring difficulty; (b) automatically inferred difficulty, using both interaction-logs and postures, when possible and available, is an even more reliable indication of difficulty; (c) video can play an important role in providing unsolicited help in both face-to-face and distributed collaboration; and (d) controlled public environments such as labs and war-rooms should be equipped with cameras that support posture mining.