Information provider: Information Systems Group
Reactions for the author: Ferdi Put
Layout: Koen Verstraete http://www.econ.kuleuven.be/tew/academic/infosys/Members/Put/Centers.htm
People: Giorgio De Michelis and Carla Simone
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The aim of the Laboratory consists both in studying cooperative processes in the work environment and in developing prototypal systems to support cooperation within office work. Emphasis is on pragmatics of communication and on supporting natural language communication by means of knowledge based systems. In the Cooperation Technologies Lab two prototypes of CSCW systems have been developed: CHAOS (Commitment Handling Active Office System), a knowledge based coordination system; and UTUCS (User To User Communication Support), a communication support integrating various communication channels. UTUCS has been developed within the Esprit ITHACA Project focusing on the use of a communication system as exception handler during procedure execution and on the multimediality of communication among humans.
Four multi-years projects are currently being carried on; the first one is the project COMIC (ESPRIT # 6225), the second is sponsored by CNR within the 'Progetto finalizzato Sistemi Informatici e Calcolo Parallelo', the third one is partially sponsored by the EEC within the COST programme and the last one is sponsored by Digital Equipment Corporation.
People: Thomas W. Malone
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The costs and capabilities of information technology are improving by orders of magnitude every decade, but we are only beginning to understand the opportunities these changes provide for new ways of organizing human activity and new kinds of technology to help people work together. The MIT Center for Coordination Science conducts multidisciplinary research to help understand these possibilities better. Research in the center draws upon many parts of MIT and ongoing projects in a variety of fields, including: computer science, organization theory, psychology, information systems, management science, and economics.
We believe that a powerful source of intellectual leverage on questions about how groups of people can use computers will result from a better understanding of the nature of coordination. Therefore, work in the center focuses on how coordination can occur, both with and without technology. The center includes projects in the following areas:
People: Tom Rodden
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Lancaster has an international reputation for research in CSCW. The objective of the Centre is to act as a focus for this research. Members from a range of departments can affiliate to the Centre, but most are drawn from Computing and from Sociology. The Centre also has Associate Members from other institutions.
The computer scientists and sociologists have been collaborating for some years on a series of research projects. The aim is to inform the design of computer support in ways which take into account the sociality of work and its activities. To date members of the group have undertaken projects in the domains of air traffic control, systems design, the police use of IT, and the financial sector. The pattern of working is for the sociologists to undertake ethnographic studies of the domain site, which are used to inform system design. Members have also contributed to the philosophy, theory and methods of CSCW, and of the interdisciplinary working which it involves.
People: Stef Joosten
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Workflow Management is rapidly becoming important. Businesses all over the world are using automated support of workflow to turn their islands of automated administrations into an efficient and effective instrument with important commercial consequences. Succes stories have caused a general belief that workflow management has at least the potential of being a major step forward in the use of information technology.
People: Peter Hoschka
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The CSCW research group started in the late 70's with the development and evaluation of electronic mail systems. The group has done research on work flow systems, directory systems, organisational knowledge modeling, task management and CSCW development tools. Other topics the group examines are quantitative methods and tools for the analysis of policy planning problems in government agencies. Refer also to the overview of CSCW group projects.
Currently we concentrate our CSCW research on the following problems:
People: Simon Kaplan
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wOrlds is focused on the development of a next generation computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) framework. Previous CSCW systems have tended to suffer from several problems - they tend to look at small problems in isolation and provide overly-rigid systems for collaboration support. To a large degree we believe these problems arise from an inadequate theoretical orientation to the issues that arise with collaboration support.
wOrlds will be a CSCW support environment that avoids these problems by building a CSCW framework that allows seamless integration of existing tools and the support of a wide range of collaborative activities, from casual encounters through highly structured processes.
This environment will be deployed and used in a wide variety of domains including software engineering, office activities and distributed simulation. It'll probably help you with your tasks, too!
People: Tom Rodden
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COMIC is a three year basic research action (1992 -> 1995) to investigate techniques and develop tools for real-world large scale CSCW application developers. It draws together both Computer Science and Social Science fields in order to try and understand the process of group communication more fully. It aims to examine and overcome the practical and theoretical problems limiting effective CSCW product development at the moment.
The project consists of four main research strands dealing with:
People: Paul Dourish
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The vision we brought from PARC was: "As technologies and the uses to which they are put change, how will we want to interact with our computing systems?" The traditional system point of view starts with the technology and worries about how to interface to the user. We believe that this view needs to be complemented by a view which starts with the users, both individuals and organisations, and works on how technology plays into the activities and business processes they are engaged with.
As the Document Company, Rank Xerox is focussing on those domains where document intensive work merges with electronic technology. We are exploring the dual nature of documents as both interfaces to work and organisational processes and as the products of these processes.
Rather than defining the lab in terms of a particular discipline - which is how many labs are defined - we have asked ourselves which disciplines would help us to pursue this vision? As a result we have teams of computer scientists, psychologists, sociologists and designers working together to study actual work settings and to develop prototype systems that explore new ways of working. We want to step outside current ways of thinking about technology rather than developing bigger or better versions of what we have already.
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People: Saul Greenberg
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Several researchers in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary are investigating CSCW and groupware. Projects have wide coverage, from asynchronous to real time conferencing, and from same-place to geographically distributed meetings.
People: Skip Ellis
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We are interested in:
People: Philip Johnson
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The Collaborative Software Development Laboratory (CSDL) pursues research along two general fronts: the development of computer systems to support group activities (collaborative software), as well as research on the process of developing software in a group setting (collaborative development).
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Groupware Central is the electronic successor of Groupware Report and is a part of ISWorld. Our goal is to provide information of interest to both researchers and users of groupware. Groupware Central is currently under construction. If you would like to help us build it, please see the Page Administration section.
Abstract:
The Workflow Management Coalition was established in August 1993 as a non-profit international body for the development and promotion of workflow standards. Its membership is open to all parties interested or involved in the creation, analysis or deployment of Workflow Management Systems..
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