This dissertation analyzes the usefulness of existing "conventional" <b>collaboration-transparency</b> systems, which permit the shared use of legacy, single-user applications. I find that conventional collaboration-transparency systems do not use network resources efficiently, and they impose an inflexible, tightly coupled style of collaboration because they do not adequately support important groupware principles: concurrent work, relaxed WYSIWIS, group awareness, and inherently collaborative tasks. This dissertation proposes and explores solutions to those deficiencies. The primary goal of this work is to maintain the benefits of collaboration transparency while relieving some of its disadvantages. To that end, I present an alternate implementation approach that provides many features previously seen only in applications specifically designed to support cooperative work, called <b>collaboration-aware</b> applications. The new approach uses a replicated architecture, in which a copy of the application resides on each user's machine, and the users' input events are broadcast to each copy. I discuss solutions to certain key problems in replicated architectures, such as maintaining consistency, unanticipated sharing, supporting late-joiners, and replicating system resources (e.g., files, sockets, and random number generators). To enhance the collaborative usability of a legacy application, the new approach <i> transparently</i> replaces selected single-user interface objects with multi-user versions at runtime. There are four requirements of an application platform needed to implement this approach: process migration, run-time object replacement, dynamic binding, and the ability to intercept and introduce low-level user input events. As an instance of this approach, I describe its incorporation into a new Java-based collaboration-transparency system, called Flexible JAMM (Java Applets Made Multi-user). This dissertation reports the results of a controlled empirical study that evaluated the usefulness of Flexible JAMM versus a representative conventional collaboration-transparency system, Microsoft NetMeeting. The results validate that Flexible JAMM meets its goals, and uncover usability problems in both systems, particularly with respect to using floor control. Additionally, the dissertation reports the results of an informal study that evaluated using Flexible JAMM as a groupware toolkit. This dissertation demonstrates that it is possible to bring collaboration transparency closer to the advantages afforded by collaboration awareness. Furthermore, the prototype system demonstrates that collaboration-aware toolkits can include multi-user versions of some standard single-user components that require no collaboration-specific programming by the toolkit user. Thus, the results of this research advance the state of the art in both collaboration-transparency systems and collaboration-aware toolkits. / Ph. D.

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Genom fallet QlikTech ger denna uppsats en aktuell inblick i hur kunskapshantering kan hanteras i en kunskapsintensiv kontext. Medarbetare har i dag möjligheter att samarbeta inom olika interaktiva digitala miljöer för att hitta och dela med sig av kunskap och erfarenheter. Denna uppsats fokuserar på att undersöka hur digitala Communitys uppkommer, växer fram och integreras för att uppnå global kunskapsdelning inom organisationer. Detta ses som en framgångsfaktor för att ta vara på kunskapsintensiva utvecklingsföretags kretivitet och innovationskraft.Genom ett tolkande tillvägagångssätt, analyseras åtta semistrukturerade kvalitativa intervjuer med medarbetare på QlikTech för att undersöka hur olika informationssystem används för att stödja olika kunskaps- och kollaborationsprocesser. Intervjuerna kompletteras med observationer and dokumentanalyser för att nå djupare insikter.Resultaten tyder på att användare använder system med fördefinierade strukturer för att dokumentera officiell kunskap, och system med framväxande strukturer för informell dialog och samarbete. Olika system kompletterar varandra, då kunskap förs över mellan system. Gräsrotsinitierande informationssystem kompenserar för glappet mellan officiella IT-implementationer och sociala kommunikationsbehov.Teknologi och praktik utvecklas hand-i-hand. Då diskussioner, idéer, perspektiv och kontext kan upprätthålls i emergent social software platforms, t.ex. Salesforce.com, kan komplext problemlösande underlättas i datorstött samarbete. Dessa plattformar minimerar glappet mellan den formella och sociala kommunikationen inom communities of practice, vilket ger förutsättningar för organisatorisk lärande.På QlikTech växer digitala communitys fram organiskt över tid. Organisationer använder data- och text mining och relaterade teknologier för att brygga fragmenterade communitys för att uppnå kapacitet att nå isolerade kunskapskällor genom sökning. Organisationer kan lägga till sociala lager över dessa fragmenterade back-end-system, designade för att bilda övergripande gränssnitt mot användare som underlättar samarbete och driver på innovation inom arbetsplatsen. / This thesis provides contemporary insights how knowledge management can be approached by a knowledge-intensive organisation. Knowledge workers today have unprecedented means to collaborate in different spaces of knowledge sharing. By analysing the case of QlikTech, results indicate that knowledge management is an integral part of knowledge-intensive organisations.By adapting an interpretive approach, eight semi-structured qualitative interviews with employees at QlikTech are analysed to find out how different information systems support different knowledge and collaboration processes. The interviews are complemented by on-the-job observations and analysis of documents to reach deeper understanding.Results indicate that users use systems with predefined structures to document official knowledge, and systems with emergent structures for informal dialogue and collaboration. Different systems complement each other, as knowledge is transferred between systems. Grass root initiated information systems compensate for the gap between official technology implementations and the social communication needs.Technology and practice co-evolve. As discussions, ideas, perspectives and context can be sustained in emergent social software platforms, such as Salesforce.com, complex problem-solving can be enabled in computer-supported cooperative work. These platforms minimise the gap between the formal and social communication within communities of practice, which facilitates organisational learning.At QlikTech, digital communities emerge organically over time. Organisations can use data and text mining, natural language processing and information extraction technologies to bridge fragmented communities to gain the capabilities to access dispersed knowledge sources through search. Organisations can add a social layer of these fragmented back-end systems, designed for building cross-functional employee-facing communities that drive collaboration and accelerate innovation in the workplace.

Topic management is the task of gathering, evaluating, organizing, and sharing a set of web sites for a specific topic. Current web tools do not provide adequate support for this task. We created and continue to develop the TopicShop system to address this need. TopicShop includes (1) a web crawler/analyzer that discovers relevant web sites and builds site profiles, and (2) user interfaces for information workspaces. We conducted an empirical pilot study comparing user performance with TopicShop vs. Yahooï . Results from this study were used to improve the design of TopicShop. A number of key design changes were incorporated into a second version of TopicShop based on results and user comments of the pilot study including (1) the tasks of evaluation and organization are treated as integral instead of separable, (2) spatial organization is important to users and must be well supported in the interface, and (3) distinct user and global datasets help users deal with the large quantity of information available on the web. A full empirical study using the second iteration of TopicShop covered more areas of the World Wide Web and validated results from the pilot study. Across the two studies, TopicShop subjects found over 80% more high-quality sites (where quality was determined by independent expert judgements) while browsing only 81% as many sites and completing their task in 89% of the time. The site profile data that TopicShop provide -- in particular, the number of pages on a site and the number of other sites that link to it -- were the key to these results, as users exploited them to identify the most promising sites quickly and easily. We also evaluated a number of link- and content-based algorithms using a dataset of web documents rated for quality by human topic experts. Link-based metrics did a good job of picking out high-quality items. Precision at 5 (the common information retrieval metric indicating the percentage of high quality items selected that are actually high quality) is about 0.75, and precision at 10 is about 0.55; this is in a dataset where 32% of all documents were of high quality. Surprisingly, a simple content-based metric, which ranked documents by the total number of pages on their containing site, performed nearly as well. These studies give insight into users' needs for the task of topic management, and provide empirical evidence of the effectiveness of task-specific interfaces (such as TopicShop) for managing topical collections. / Ph. D.

Constructing common ground and the associated convergent conceptual change is critical to cooperative work and learning. Convergent conceptual change is achieved as participants in a conversation update common ground through presentations, repairs, and acceptances of utterances. People employ available techniques that utilize the least collaborative effort for current purposes. Although sharing physical co-presence of interlocutors' facial expressions doesn't make grounding more efficient even in more open-ended and less task-focused dialogues, visual co-presence of the addressee's workspace is essential to work-related tasks, such as information transmission and collaborative problem-solving. However, handheld-mediated collaborative activity makes sharing the workspace challenging, especially when we consider that handhelds possess small screens and permit activities of a distributed nature. In a handheld-mediated classroom, a teacher must be able to check students' work for various reasons (e.g., grading, checking whether they are following directions correctly or paying attention) and at various phases of the activity. Gazing into the small screen of a handheld over someone's shoulder is a tricky task at best. The teacher may misread the information on the screen and thus provide incorrect feedback. Another challenge involves the difficulty inherent in latecomers joining the collaborative activity when each student is involved with his or her individual and small screen. This exclusion from joining on-going activity can reduce the chance of student's vicarious and serendipitous learning. Although such events may occur naturally in the learning environment, they become important concerns when one attempts to focus collaborative activities with handheld devices. I therefore created a new handheld network service called "Look," which is designed to facilitate the acquisition of common ground and allow a latecomer to do meaningful monitoring of ongoing conversation about the workspace. I tested empirically the value of this shared physical/virtual context in the task of creating common ground by examining task performance and conversation quality. / Ph. D.

Spatial collaboration refers to collaboration activities involving physical space. It occurs every day as people work together to solve spatial problems, such as rearranging furniture or communicating about an environmental issue. In this work, we investigate how to support spatial collaboration when the collaborators are not colocated. We propose using shared, interactive representations of the space to support distributed, spatial collaboration. Our study examines viewpoint constraint techniques, which determine how the collaborators individually view the representation, and awareness techniques, which enable the collaborators to maintain an understanding of each other's work efforts. Our work consists of four phases, in which we explore a design space for interactive representations and examine the effects of different viewpoint constraint and awareness techniques. We consider situations where the collaborators use the same viewpoints, different viewpoints, and have a choice in viewpoint constraint techniques. In phase 1, we examine current technological support for spatial collaboration and designed two early prototypes. Phase 2 compares various two-dimensional map techniques, with the collaborators using identical techniques. Phase 3 focuses on three-dimensional virtual environment techniques, comparing similar and different frames of reference. The final phase reuses the favorable techniques from the previous studies and presents a novel prototype that combines both two-dimensional and three-dimensional representations. Each phase of this research is limited to synchronous communication activities and non-professional users working together on everyday tasks. Our findings highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the different techniques for spatial collaboration solutions. Also, having conducted multiple evaluations of spatial collaboration prototypes, we offer a common set of lessons with respect to distributed, spatial collaboration activities. This research also highlights the need for continued study to improve on the techniques evaluated and to consider additional spatial collaboration activities. / Ph. D.

There are myriad examples of virtual communities and environments available for collaborative activities. However, most of these environments are confined to the desktop and thus preclude collaboration while users are on the move. Through a scenario-based design process, this article establishes the importance of mobile collaborative environments that are readily accessible for users on mobile devices. The element of mobile accessibility for collaborative environments renders them ubiquitous—they can be used anywhere and at any time. A working prototype is then presented that has been developed to supplement an existing desktop-based online virtual community. The prototype illustrates a generic, extensible and platform-independent architecture for translating a desktop collaborative environment into a mobile system. Based on the prototype, we also foresee its application for users in fieldwork settings, particularly for learning and educational activities of teachers, students, and peers through collaboration in a distributed environment. / Master of Science

En modernisering av Air Traffic Management pågår för att hållbart hantera den förutsedda ökningen av flygtrafik fram till år 2035. Som en del av denna modernisering har Saab AB utvecklat en produkt, “Digital Tower”, som möjliggör att flygtorn kan fjärrstyras genom ett system av kameror. I syfte om att öka kunskap kring flygledarnas behov och flygsäkerhet i takt med ökad mängd flygtrafik, har denna studie undersökt den kognitiva belastningen inom den operativa miljön av en Digital Tower som är i bruk. I dess nuvarande form har interaktiva gränssnitt inom arbetsmiljön begränsad flexibilitet och anpassningsmöjligheter. Frågeställningen har därför ställts kring hur dessa begränsade anpassningsmöjligheter påverkar flygledares arbete och samarbete. Studien har utgått ifrån en kvalitativ metodik, en contextual inquiry med observationer och intervjuer i kontext där arbetet skedde. Analysen gjordes utifrån Distributed Cognition som teoretiskt ramverk, vilket möjliggjorde en analys av den distribuerade kognitionen mellan aktörer och hur de brukar artefakter inom kontexten. Studiens slutsats är att gränssnittets begränsade anpassningsmöjligheter påverkar den kognitiva belastningen negativt, men anses inte som ett hinder för flygledarnas arbete. Eftersom den centraliserade arbetsmiljön har en stark närvaro av kollegor, har resultatet blivit att kollegorna kan kompensera för gränssnittets brister och avlasta i situationer av hög arbetsbelastning. / An ongoing modernization of Air Traffic Management is in effect to keep up with the forecasted increase in air traffic by 2035. As a part of this modernization a product was developed by Saab AB to control air traffic from remote control towers with a system of cameras, called “Digital Tower”. With the purpose of increasing the knowledge about the needs of Air Traffic Controllers and general flight safety with increased amount of flight traffic, this study researched the cognitive load within the operative Digital Tower environment in service. Currently the interactive interface within the work environment has limited flexibility and possibilities for adaptation. The study has therefore answered the question about how these limited adaptations affect the Air Traffic Controllers work and collaboration between them. The study has used qualitative methods in order to answer the question, by using a contextual inquiry which includes observations and interviews of the Air Traffic Controllers in their context. The result was analyzed by using Distributed Cognition theory, which made it possible to analyze the distributed cognition between people and artifacts within the context. The conclusion of the study is that the limited adaptations of the interface negatively affects the cognitive load, but has not been identified as a crucial interference for the Air Traffic Controllers. The centralized work environment has a strong presence of colleagues, which has led to the colleagues compensating for the limited interface by physically unburden the workload in critical situations.

This thesis is concerned with the study of biomedical scientific research work that is intensely distributed, i.e. socially distributed across multiple institutions, sites, and disciplines. Specifically, this PhD probes the ways in which scientists co-operating on multi-sited crossdisciplinary projects, design, use and maintain information-based resources to conduct and coordinate their experimental activities. The research focuses on the roles of information artefacts, i.e. the tools, media and devices used to store, track, display, and retrieve information in paper or electronic format, in helping the scientists integrate their activities to achieve concerted action. To examine how scientists in globally distributed settings organise and co-ordinate their scientific work using information artefacts, a multi-method multi-sited study informed by different ethnographic perspectives was conducted focused on a large European crossdisciplinary translational research project in nanodiagnostics. Situated interviews with project scientists, participant observations and participatory learning exercises were designed and deployed. From the data analysis, several abstractions were developed to represent how the joined utilisations of key information artefacts support the co-ordination of experimental activities. Subsequently, a framework was developed to highlight key interactional strategies that need to be managed by experimenters when using artefacts to organise their work cooperatively. This framework was then used as a guiding device to identify innovative ways to design future digital interactive systems to support the co-ordination of intensely distributed scientific work. From this study, several key findings came to light. We identify the role of the experimental protocol acts as a co-ordinative map that is co-designed dynamically to disseminate various instantiations of experimental executions across sites. We have also shed light on the ways the protocol, the lab book and the material log are used jointly to support the articulation of scientific work. The protocol and the lab book are used both locally and across co-operating sites to support four repeatability and reproducibility levels that are key to experimental validation. The use of the local protocol / lab book dyads at each site is further integrated with that of a centralised material log artefact to enable a system of exchange of scientific content (e.g. experimental processes, intermediate results and observations) and experimental materials (both physical materials and key information). We have found that this integration into a co-ordinative cluster supports awareness and the articulation of experimental activities both locally and across remote labs. From this understanding, we have derived several sensitising tensions to frame the strategies that scientific practitioners need to manage when designing their multi-sited experimental work and technologists should consider when designing systems to support them: (1) formalisation / flexibility; (2) articulability / local appropriateness; (3) scrutiny / tinkering; (4) accountability / applicability; (5) traceability / improvisation and (6) lastingness / immediacy. Lastly, based on these tensions, we have suggested a number of implications for the design of interactive information artefacts that can help manage both local and multi-sited co-ordination in intensely distributed scientific projects.

This study investigates whether the social facilitation effect takes place when a person performs a computerized task that includes an animated intelligent agent (IA). The moderating effects of two individual differences, locus of control (LOC) and microcomputer playfulness (MCP), are tested for. It was proposed that an IA's presence would cause participants to exhibit this effect and that LOC and MCP would moderate a participant's arousal, measured as state anxiety, such that those possessing an internal LOC and those exhibiting high MCP would experience less arousal when performing computerized tasks with an IA present. Data was analyzed using a 2 (task difficulty) x 4 (intelligent agent) repeated measures MANCOVA. Most hypotheses are not supported, however MCP does appear to moderate arousal depending on the behavior of the IA.