Sharad Vimal Oberoi

DISASTER PREPAREDNESS IN THE HILLS: NATURAL HAZARD MODELING USING GIS AND REMOTE SENSING

Spatial and temporal multi-layered information is required to assess the natural hazard susceptibility in th e mountainous regions. The manual method of data integration for targeting potential zones susceptible to these hazards is expensive and time -consuming. The aim of this study is to operationalise a working methodology wherein geo -environmental parameters are analysed to develop models for mapping avalanche and landslide -prone areas using remotely sensed data and Geographic Information System (GIS). This technique can be used for speedy generation and updating of the landslide/avalanche hazard maps of remote areas and strategically plan for the future developmental activities by delineating the potential zones and avoiding them while laying out new roads in this difficult terrain. The utility of this methodology for the collection, integration and analysis o f spatially-oriented data, as well as in finding out the inherent relation between separate entities has also been highlighted for an existing hill road in the Manali -Leh Axis situated in the Lower and Upper Himalayan snow climatic zone. It is expected that the present paper will highlight the utility of temporal remotely -sensed data and knowledge-based Geographical Information Systems for collection, integration and analysis of spatially-oriented data, as well as in finding out the inherent relation betwee n separate entities.

Online Implementation of the Delta Design Game for Analyzing Collaborative Team Practices

Over the past four years the authors have developed an online version of the Delta Design game, a board game which was developed by Bucciarelli (1) to teach students design collaboration skills. In the online version, players move tiles on a shared virtual board and communicate only through text chat. In addition, the objective functions are computed automatically each time a tile is moved, so the focus of the game changes from rapid number-crunching to negotiation. Since every state of the board, along with micro-level team performance and chat data, are captured, the resulting corpus from 38 four-player team games provides a rich resource to explore different aspects of collaborative team practices.This paper gives an overview of the online implementation of Delta Design and discusses the findings from user studies including several undergraduate capstone design classes. Observations of the board-moving tactics show that teams planning a strategy before starting the game or players sharing details about their role’s constraints with other team members do not have much effect on the game’s outcome. Finally, this paper demonstrates that the complex rules of the Delta Design game make it a suitable candidate for analyzing collaboration strategies in team-based design projects.Copyright

INTERACTIVE DESIGN NAVIGATIONAL TOOLS

For both student and professional design teams, the design and development process requires that collaborators build and retain knowledge through discussions, creating documents and sharing artifacts. Key to supporting these knowledge building activities is the development of an infrastructure that supports effective knowledge management. This paper presents the framework for an information management technology called DesignWebs, which assimilates the product structures from the evolving set of documents and discussions about an engineering artifact. A DesignWeb enables users to see evolving connections between concepts by using a navigable web-based interface that synthesizes the design knowledge from multiple sources of information.Copyright

DesignWebs: a tool for automatic construction of interactive conceptual maps from document collections

Prior work supports the pedagogical value of conceptual maps for offering students an overview of a topic as well as the connections between subtopics In this poster we describe a system that uses automated topic modeling technology to map the topics and sub-topics in a collection of documents An interactive graphical representation allows users to explore this topic analysis, using it as an interface for browsing a collection of documents We present a small user study evaluating the usability of the interactive map.

Automatic Extraction of Conceptual Maps From Design Team Documents

Most engineering project classes expect teams of students to collaborate and to build on existing knowledge to accomplish their project goals. As the project evolves, the team is expected to develop a shared understanding. However, students often become overwhelmed by the amount of information available and lose sight of the big picture. Instructors may also find it difficult to keep track of individual and team activities and are often forced to evaluate the product instead of the learning process. This paper presents preliminary results from a tool that supports effective knowledge management for engineering design projects. This framework, called DesignWebs, automatically extracts conceptual maps from the team’s evolving set of documents and discussions about an engineering artifact. It uses Latent Dirichlet Allocation, hierarchical clustering, and other machine learning techniques to generate a navigable web-based graph. Both instructors and students can browse this graph interactively to explore the concepts embedded inside design team documents and the connections between them. An experiment performed on documents obtained from a project course shows the effectiveness of DesignWebs in synthesizing the design knowledge from multiple sources of information in engineering project teams.Copyright

ArtifactWebs: Navigable product structures

Students working on team-based design courses often have difficulty tracking the evolution of their design. Student teams seldom have complete meeting notes and frequently backtrack on previous decisions, wasting substantial time and resources. As documents are generated by different team members at different times during a project, not everyone is aware of what is in all the documents. Locating the right information among evolving documents such as different versions of the same document (e.g., a final report), or static documents that are referred to frequently (e.g. a key reference or manual) can be time consuming and often futile. Even for teams with well-structured document management systems, finding the correct paragraph or document fragment for a given topic can be difficult. In addition, as the design progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of the progress made by other team members as well as the options already explored by them. These problems exist for both industry and student teams, but are usually more severe for students who are novices in the design process. Another problem for student design teams is that of requirements deviation, in which the interpretation of decisions by different team members may be not only different, but often conflicting. Detecting such problems as they occur would be advantageous for the team and increase the probability of the projects success. Students lack both the tools and the perspective to structure and manage the documents that they generate and use. Our goal is make it easier for student teams to manage their design process by being able to: (1) see the current state of the project they are working on and check if they are missing a crucial part, and (2) focus their efforts on a particular artifact of interest in completed projects, regardless of where it occurs in the documents. To accomplish this, we propose to create navigable ArtifactWebs that will help design team members to visualize the current state of the project based on the artifacts described in the project documents and technical discussions. In this paper, we present a preliminary version of the ArtifactWeb, based on three years of data from a multidisciplinary team-based design course, which is offered every spring at Carnegie Mellon University.