Multi-user computer-aided design (CAD) is an emerging technology that promises to facilitate collaboration, enhance product quality, and reduce product development lead times by allowing multiple engineers to work on the same design at the same time. The BYU site of the NSF Center for e-Design has developed advanced multi-user CAD prototypes that have demonstrated the feasibility and value of this technology. Despite the possibilities that this software opens up for enhanced collaboration, there are now a new variety of challenges and opportunities to understand and address. For multi-user CAD to be used effectively in a modern engineering environment, it is necessary to understand and address both human and technical collaboration challenges. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand and address these challenges. Two studies were performed to better understand the human side of engineering collaboration: (1) engineers from multiple companies were interviewed to assess the collaboration challenges they experience, and (2) players of the multi-player game Minecraft were surveyed and studied to understand how a multi-user environment affects design collaboration. Methods were also developed to address two important technical challenges in multi-user CAD: (1) a method for detecting undo conflicts, and (2) additional methods for administering data access. This research addresses some of the important human and technical collaboration challenges in multi-user CAD. It enhances our understanding of collaboration challenges in engineering industry and how multi-user CAD will help address some of those challenges. It also enhances our understanding of how a multi-user design environment will affect design collaboration. The method developed for detecting conflicts that occur during local undo in multi-user CAD can be used to block conflicts from occurring and provide the user with some information about the cause of the conflict so they can collaborate to resolve it. The methods developed for administering data access in multi-user CAD will help protect against unauthorized access to sensitive data.

The NSF Center for e-Design, Brigham Young University (BYU) site has re-architected Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools, enabling multiple users to concurrently create, modify and view the same CAD part or assembly. This technology allows engineers, designers and manufacturing personnel to simultaneously contribute to the design of a part or assembly in real time,enabling parallel work environments within the CAD system. Multi-user systems are only as robust and efficient as their methods for managing conflicts and preserving model consistency. Conflicts occur in multi-user CAD when multiple users interoperate with the same or dependent geometry. Some conflicts can lead to model inconsistencies which means that each user's instance of the model are not identical. Other conflicts cause redundant work or waste in the design process. This dissertation presents methods to avoid and resolve conflicts which lead to model inconsistency and waste in the design process. The automated feature reservation method is presented which prevents multiple users from simultaneously editing the same feature, thus avoiding conflicts. In addition, a method is also presented which ensures that copies of the model stay consistent between distributed CAD clients by enforcing modeling operations to occur in the same order on all the clients. In cases of conflict, the conflicting operations are preserved locally for manual resolution by the user. An efficient model consistency method is presented which provides consistent references to the topological entities in a CAD model, ensuring operations are applied consistently on all models. An integrated task management system is also presented which avoids conflicts related to varying user design intent. Implementations and results of each method are presented. Results show that the methods effectively manage conflicts and ensure model consistency, thus providing a solution for a robust multi-user CAD system.

We investigate the development of collaborative data dashboards, comprised of web visualization components. For this, we explore the use of Lively Web as a development platform and provide a framework for developing web collaborative scientific visualizations. We use a modern thin-client approach that moves most of the specific application processing logic from the client side to the server side, leveraging the implementation of reusable web services. As a web application, it provides users with multi-platform and multi-device compatibility along with enhanced concurrent access from remote locations. Our platform focuses on providing reusable, interactive, extensible and tightly- integrated web visualization components. Such visualization components are designed to be readily usable in distributed-synchronous collaborative environments. As use case we consider the development of a dashboard for researchers working with bioinformatics datasets, in particular Poxviruses data. We argue that our thin-client approach for developing web collaborative visualizations can greatly benefit researchers in different geographic locations in their mission of analyzing datasets as a team. / Graduate

[pt] A atual evolução dos dispositivos computacionais móveis e a crescente ubiqüidade de redes sem fio possibilitam o desenvolvimento de serviços e aplicativos para colaboração entre usuários móveis nos mais variados ambientes como em domicílios, lugares públicos, universidades, empresas, entre outros. Em uma sala de aula, acredita-se que o uso de dispositivos móveis (com capacidade de comunicação sem fio) torna o aprendizado mais interativo e estimulante. Este trabalho descreve um aplicativo distribuído, denominado iPH (Interactive Presenter for Handhelds), que possibilita o compartilhamento e a co-edição de transparências entre o instrutor e os aprendizes em sala de aula, e os componentes de middleware utilizados no desenvolvimento do mesmo. O iPH pode ser executado em diferentes tipos de dispositivos como tablet pcs, notebooks e handhelds (palmtops ou smartphones), e acessa informações de contexto computacional do dispositivo para efetuar auto-adaptações na sua funcionalidade, para entre outros, melhorar a interação com o usuário. / [en] The ongoing improvement of portable devices and the increasing ubiquity of wireless networks enable the development of services and applications for anyplace- any-time collaboration among mobile users in many different environments, such as at home, in public areas, in universities, in companies, among others. It is expected that the use of portable, wireless-enabled devices in classrooms improves the interaction and engagement in the learning process. This work describes a distributed application named iPH (Interactive Presenter for Handhelds) that supports the sharing and co-edition of presentations among an instructor and students of a classroom, as well as the middleware components used for the development of iPH. This system can be executed on a wide range of devices, such as tablets, notebooks and handhelds (palmtops or smartphones), and uses the device`s context information to adapt itself to improve, for example, the interaction with the user.

De nos jours, les technologies de l'information offrent aux utilisateurs la possibilité de travailler avec n'importe qui, à n'importe quel moment, de n'importe où et avec plusieurs dispositifs hétérogènes. Cette évolution favorise un nouveau modèle distribué de collaboration de confiance où les utilisateurs peuvent travailler sur des documents partagés avec qui ils ont confiance. La collaboration multi-synchrone est largement utilisée pour soutenir le travail collaboratif en maintenant des flux simultanés de l'activité des utilisateurs qui divergent et convergent continuellement. Cependant, ce modèle n'offre pas de support concernant l'expression et la vérification de restriction d'usage des données. Cette thèse présente C-PPC, un modèle de collaboration basé sur les contrats et sur la confiance. Dans ce modèle, des contrats sont utilisés comme des règles d'utilisation des données et les utilisateurs collaborent en fonction des niveaux de confiance qu'ils attribuent aux autres en accord avec le respect des contrats. Nous formalisons les contrats en utilisant des concepts déontiques: permission, obligation et prohibition. Les contrats sont inclus dans les historiques d'opérations des données partagées. Le modèle C-PPC fournit un mécanisme pour la fusion des modifications des données et des contrats. N'importe quel utilisateur peut auditer les historiques à n'importe quel moment et les résultats de l'audit sont utilisés pour actualiser les niveaux de confiance en se basant sur une métrique de confiance. Nous proposons une solution reposant sur des authentificateurs basés sur les chaînes de hachage pour garantir l'intégrité des historiques et la responsabilité des utilisateurs. Nous fournissons des algorithmes pour construire les authentificateurs et vérifier les historiques puis nous prouvons leur correction. Des résultats expérimentaux montrent la faisabilité du modèle C-PPC / Nowadays, information technologies provide users ability to work with anyone, at any time, from everywhere and with several heterogeneous devices. This evolution fosters a new distributed trustworthy collaboration model where users can work on shared documents with whom they trust. Multi-synchronous collaboration is widely used for supporting collaborative work by maintaining simultaneous streams of user activities which continually diverge and converge. However, this model lacks support on how usage restrictions on data can be expressed and checked within the model. This thesis proposes "C-PPC", a multi-synchronous contract-based and trust-aware collaboration model. In this model, contracts are used as usage rules and users collaborate according to trust levels they have on others computed according to contract compliance. We formalize contracts by using deontic concepts: permission, obligation and prohibition. Contracts are enclosed in logs of operations over shared data. The C-PPC model provides a mechanism for merging data changes and contracts. Any user can audit logs at any time and auditing results are used to update user trust levels based on a trust metric. We propose a solution relying on hash-chain based authenticators that ensures integrity of logs and user accountability. We provide algorithms for constructing authenticators and verifying logs and prove their correctness. A set of experimental results shows the feasibility of the C-PPC model