William K. McQuay

Security and Access Control for a Human-centric Collaborative Commerce System

The rise of globally distributed computer based workspaces has enabled the incorporation of collaboration in electronic commerce (e-Commerce) systems. Working in collaborative environments with e-Commerce technologies leads to the subject of collaborative commerce (or c-Commerce). C-Commerce creates dynamic collaboration and harnesses organizations’ information and knowledge base into a computer-based framework to support personalized access to potentially all participants and information in a given community. One of the main concerns in such a system is security and control of access. Many distributed organizations and individuals want to work together and share their information and knowledge in the process. At the same time, they need to protect their privacy and sensitive information and establish proper protocols for access and sharing activities. This paper discusses a human-centered collaborative commerce system (HCCS) and its security and access control design. Specifically, it presents three security modules and components that will support collaborative exchange and processes. We, then, introduce an improved access control method and algorithm which is role-, group-, and task-based (RGT-based access control) that ensures information and resources access efficiently. Developing further access control algorithms and implementations will be considered in a variety of case studies in future work.

Efficient Handling of Changes in Dynamic Workflow Systems

Workflow systems have been used in collaborative environments for many years to assist individuals and organizations to organize project executions and carry out work sequences. Two conflicting goals are argued in the literature regarding workflow systems: the need to provide efficient flexibility in terms of capabilities to handle changing situations and the need for control without creating high overhead. For this reason, current research in workflow systems concentrates primarily on making the workflows flexible to changes in processes. In this paper, we present an approach to handle changes in dynamic workflow systems. First, we introduce efficient change handling algorithms that will incorporate certain modifications that must be made in the current workflow, and based on the results, a new workflow will be generated accordingly. Then we introduce a case study to validate our algorithms. Finally, we simulate and compare the proposed algorithms with existing ones to show the level of improvement that can be achieved.

The Collaboration grid: Trends for next generation distributed collaborative environments

Distributed collaboration will be a pervasive technology that will significantly change how decisions are made in the 21st century. Advanced collaborative technologies are evolving rapidly with changes in the underlying computer and information technology. Collaboration is typically defined as two or more geographically dispersed entities working together to share and exchange data, information, knowledge, and actions. This paper will address how evolving technologies and new trends such as web services and grid computing will impact distributed collaborative environments. A new conceptual environment called the Collaboration Grid based on these new standards is evolving. The marriage of advanced information, collaboration, and simulation technologies will provide the decision maker with a new generation of collaborative virtual environments for planning and decision support.

Distributed collaborative environments for 21st century modeling and simulation

Distributed collaboration is an emerging technology that will significantly change how modeling and simulation is employed in 21st century organizations. Modeling and simulation (M&S) is already an integral part of how many organizations conduct business and, in the future, will continue to spread throughout government and industry enterprises and across many domains from research and development to logistics to training to operations. This paper reviews research that is focusing on the open standards agent-based framework, product and process modeling, structural architecture, and the integration technologies - the glue to integrate the software components. A distributed collaborative environment is the underlying infrastructure that makes communication between diverse simulations and other assets possible and manages the overall flow of a simulation based experiment. The AFRL Collaborative Environment concept will foster a major cultural change in how the acquisition, training, and operational communities employ M&S.

Fundamental features of a unified trust model for distributed systems

Trust and trustworthiness are significant measurements of a distributed sensing system or a heterogeneous network comprised of sources of information, knowledge, hardware and software. In an effort to design a unified trust model that can be made adaptable to changing application environments, we present fundamental features and rules extracted from literature pertaining to wireless sensor networks, social networks, e-commerce, mobile ad-hoc, peer-to-peer, and distributed network services. The design constraints are: it must (a) support a heterogeneous network, (b) obtain and evaluate multiple trustworthiness measures, (c) be carried out with computational ease without extensive computational power from the sensor network, and (d) be conceptually simple but have a firm basis in theory.

Review of trust research from an interdisciplinary perspective - psychology, sociology, economics, and cyberspace

Trust and trustworthiness apply to a wide range of applications in automation and human interactions. Their definitions and characteristics vary depending on the context and the situation. Nevertheless, they are significant because of risk, vulnerability, uncertainty, and confidence. In this paper we review past work to converge our understanding of Trust (human centric and subjective) and trustworthiness (hardware/software centric and objective) across fields including literature from psychological, sociological, economic, automation, and cyberspace perspectives of trust. We expect to create a more rigorous definition of trust and trustworthiness that leads to finding the appropriate metrics to measure trust and trustworthiness dynamically.

Collaborative Engineering Environment for 21 st Century avionics

Collaborative engineering and virtual prototyping is the application of advanced distributed modeling and simulation and engineering tools in an integrated environment to support technology development, system design, performance, cost, and producibility trade-off analyses throughout the entire product and system engineering life-cycle. The Sensors and Information Directorates, Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) have initiated a major effort to implement a Collaborative Engineering Environment (CEE) to provide the infrastructure and development methodology required for affordable and timely avionics for the 21st Century warfighter. The CEE concept is a major cultural change in the technology development process that involves applying state-of-the-art simulation and information sharing technology to the way we do business. CEE enables partnerships among the laboratories, industry, and the warfighter to accelerate the development and transition of leading edge technology to operational weapon systems.

Multi-Disciplinary Integrated Framework and Architecture for a Human Centered Collaborative Commerce System

In recent years, collaborative commerce (or c-commerce) and human-centric systems have been research subjects of keen interest in Web-based technologies and have become a major focus for many organizations. C-commerce provides and supports dynamic collaborative environments over the Internet and other potential public information networks (PINs). It offers many levels of collaborative interactions and enables organizations and individuals to work simultaneously, cooperatively, as well as independently. Of late, it has become increasingly important to integrate human-centered designs in collaborative systems to achieve user-oriented environments. This paper presents human-centered c-commerce system (HCCS), an architectural framework for collaborative commerce with integration of some human aspects. We discuss its framework and describe each component of the proposed architecture. We contend that using an intelligent c-commerce system, such as HCCS, will enhance collaboration between individual users and among organizations, and will provide effective infrastructure to achieve the intended objectives of collaborative work

Polymorphic collaboration in the global grid

Next generation collaborative systems must be able to represent the same information in different forms on a broad spectrum of devices and resources from low end personal digital assistants (PDA) to high performance computers (HPC). Users might be on a desktop then switch to a laptop and then to a PDA while accessing the global grid. The user preference profile for a collaboration session should be capable of moving with them as well as be automatically adjusted for the device type. Collaborative systems must be capable of representing the same information in many forms for different domains and on many devices and thus be polymorphic. Polymorphic collaboration will provide an ability for multiple heterogeneous resources (human to human, human to machine and machine to machine) to share information and activities, as well as the ability to regulate collaborative sessions based on client characteristics and needs; reuse user profiles, tool category choices, and settings in future collaboration session by same or different users; use intelligent agents to assist collaborative systems in learning user/resource preferences and behaviors, and autonomously derive optimal information to provide to users and decision makers. This paper discusses ongoing research in next generation collaborative environments with the goal of making electronic collaboration as easy to use as the telephone - collaboration at the touch of the screen.

Toward a distributed collaborative human-centric decision-making system: An information grid approach

Advances in computer science and communication technologies have helped people, businesses, and organizations interact faster and easier than ever before. In the future, computers will be required to play a lot more active role in performing a wide range of activities, such as collaboration, decision-making, task automation, data and information management, and so on, to create and share knowledge while assisting users in performing tasks. Computers will have to be a seamless and transparent part of our environment, and their design will have to concentrate as much on human centeredness as on other aspects of the system. Tomorrows computer based environments will require an optimal integration of decision-making, knowledge management, and human computer interaction aspects. They will also need to be truly pervasive and ubiquitous in nature. The main goal of this paper is to propose an Information Grid-based approach towards realizing such human-centric computing systems in a distributed environment, in order to facilitate collaboration, knowledge sharing, and distributed decision-making, at both local and global levels. The proposed framework is a layered approach that incorporates decision making, human centeredness and knowledge management at various points in the architecture. A first step towards the implementation of such a system is also proposed by incorporating the HUDS architecture [16] in a grid-based scenario. This implementation incorporates four important properties, namely, pervasiveness, awareness, autonomicity, and human factors in order to make the system human centric in nature.