Collaborative Research Community Research Articles

How Connected are the ACM SIG Communities?

Currently, computer scientists publish more in conferences than journals and several conferences are the main venue in many computer science subareas. There has been considerable debate about the role of conferences for computer science research and one of the main arguments in favor of them is that conferences bring researchers together, allowing them to enhance collaborations and establish research communities in a young and fast-evolving discipline. In this work, we investigate if computer science conferences are really able to create collaborative research communities by analyzing the structure of the communities formed by the flagship conferences of several ACM SIGs. Our findings show that most of these flagship conferences are able to connect their main authors in large and well-structured communities. However, we have noted that in a few ACM SIG flagship conferences authors do not collaborate over the years, creating a structure with several small disconnected components.

Theoretical Challenges of Indigenous Archaeology: Setting an Agenda

AbstractIndigenous archaeology focuses on laudable processes of collaborative community research and decolonization. In contrast, theoretical contributions of Indigenous archaeology in terms of interpreting archaeological materials have been minimally articulated beyond praxis. Does Indigenous archaeology have an interpretative theoretical agenda? This paper addresses this question and articulates an agenda through distillation of theoretical developments and concerns from the considerable literature on Indigenous archaeology that has emerged from the Americas, Australia, and Africa over the past two decades. A shared fundamental concern is challenging ontological and epistemological divides and dualisms within mainstream Western archaeology. Two key dimensions of Indigenous archaeology are elaborated to provide broader scope to contextualize and address these theoretical challenges. First,encountering the pastchallenges objectivist tangibility of the archaeological record with ancestral presence and contexts where artifactual absence is the (in)tangible signature of spiritual association. Second,historicing the presentchallenges secularist archaeologies of a detached past with archaeologies of the more familiar ethnographically known recent past linked to identity and diachronic explorations of ontology and spiritualism. An agenda that embraces these theoretical challenges presents major opportunities for mainstream archaeology to reorient its Eurocentric focus and produce more cross-culturally relevant and culturally nuanced and sensitive understandings of the past.

Reviving a Lost Potential of the Chicago School of Sociology?

This paper traces the effects of anti-Asian politics and immigration exclusion in shaping early studies of Asian migration in the Pacific region, in particular within the United States, Canada, and Australian. Yu argues that there are collaborative community research approaches that marked early 20th century studies of Asian migrants to North America that should be recovered, a lost potential of early survey research work of the Chicago school of sociology in general.

Data sharing in the undiagnosed diseases network.

The Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN) builds on the successes of the Undiagnosed Diseases Program at the National Institutes of Health (NIH UDP). Through support from the NIH Common Fund, a coordinating center, six additional clinical sites, and two sequencing cores comprise the UDN. The objectives of the UDN are to: (1) improve the level of diagnosis and care for patients with undiagnosed diseases through the development of common protocols designed by an enlarged community of investigators across the network; (2) facilitate research into the etiology of undiagnosed diseases, by collecting and sharing standardized, high-quality clinical and laboratory data including genotyping, phenotyping, and environmental exposure data; and (3) create an integrated and collaborative research community across multiple clinical sites, and among laboratory and clinical investigators, to investigate the pathophysiology of these rare diseases and to identify options for patient management. Broad-based data sharing is at the core of achieving these objectives, and the UDN is establishing the policies and governance structure to support broad data sharing.

Building Critical Community Engagement through Scholarship: Three Case Studies

Drawing on a shared recognition that community is defined, understood, constructed, and reconstructed through contextually inflected relationships, collaborating authors use diverse interdisciplinary case studies to argue that rigorous community-engaged scholarship advances capacities for critical pursuit of cognitive and social justice. Whether through participant-centred projects undertaken with youth in government care networks, cross-cultural explorations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous science and culture as resources for food security, or facilitated dramatizations of community relations impacted by neo-liberal ideologies, contributors affirm welcoming co-learning environments that engage multiple forms of knowledge expression and mobilization. The respectful spaces held in these community-researcher collaborations enable new advances beyond hegemonic knowledge development institutionalized through colonialist histories. This essay theorizes prospects for building transformative community through scholarship, citing practical examples of the principles and practices that foster or frustrate sustainable communities. It explores the institutional arrangements and power dynamics between and among actors, asking who gets included and excluded, and what boundaries are created and crossed around complex, contradictory, and contested notions of “community.” Â

The new Reithians

The ongoing Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Pararchive project seeks to build new interactive environments that explore issues of ownership, public and institutional relationships and provide tools for collaborative community research and creative expression using digital heritage resources.1 It was motivated by recognition that communities are encountering real barriers to organizing and connecting to resources and with each other. In the field of cultural heritage it is often difficult to access archival materials from public institutions and overcome barriers to what could and should be mutually enriching relationships. In this context, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has traditionally been seen as a problematic institution – publicly funded and immeasurably rich – yet distant and patrician. Working with Head of BBC Archive Development Tony Ageh, the project team is focusing on issues such as copyright and institutional voice as a means of facilitating a more open and collaborative audience relationship. As part of our current dialogue, we have also been examining the traditions within the BBC that might act as a block to these activities. Our initial conclusion is that a major part of the problem lies in the lack of partnership between the BBC and its licence paying audience, and we have made that a key focus of our study. This article outlines the background to the Pararchive project and the specific focus within it on the relationship between the BBC and its audiences.

Building up Reflective Communities through Exploring the Perception of Adult Educators’ in Actual Practise

This research paper intends to unravel the perception of adult educators on reflective practice; whether there is a disparity between belief and actual practice, and factors that affect their involvement in reflective practice. The purpose of the present study is three-pronged: (1) to have a better understanding of the various viewpoints on reflective practice held by adult educators; (2) to enhance my research competence through reflecting upon research practice; and (3) to foster reflective practice through forming a collaborative research community.This research paper is basically divided into three parts. The first part (Chapter 2) provides a review of the conceptual framework of reflective practice through a critical examination of the divergent viewpoints raised by various researchers and practitioners. Although it is hard to bring together the divergent viewpoints into a coherent framework, the review attempts to set the theoretical orientation to the research study.The second part (Chapter 3) is on the research study. Four research questions have been set to guide the research study. This chapter will discuss the instrument used for data collection and synthesis the findings of the research study.The third part (Chapter 4) is a summary of the insights that the researcher gained from the research study as a reflective practitioner. This chapter also highlights the merits of a collaborative research community. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2013.v3n7p218

Diversity in collaborative research communities: a multicultural, multidisciplinary thesis writing group in public health

Writing groups for doctoral students are generally agreed to provide valuable learning spaces for Ph.D. candidates. Here an academic developer and the eight members of a writing group formed in a Discipline of Public Health provide an account of their experiences of collaborating in a multicultural, multidisciplinary thesis writing group. We consider the benefits of belonging to such a group for Ph.D. students who are operating in a research climate in which disciplinary boundaries are blurring and where an increasing number of doctoral projects are interdisciplinary in nature; in which both academic staff and students come from enormously diverse cultural and language backgrounds; and in which teamwork, networking and collaboration are prized but not always proactively facilitated. We argue that doctoral writing groups comprising students from diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds can be of significant value for postgraduates who wish to collaborate on their own academic development to improve their research writing and communication skills; at the same time, such collaborative work effectively builds an inclusive, dynamic research community.

CrossMedia: Supporting Collaborative Research of Media Retrieval

The goal of our new e-science platform is to support collaborative research communities by providing a simple solution to jointly develop semantic- and media search algorithms on common and challenging datasets processed by novel feature extractors. Querying of nearest neighbor (NN) elements on large data collections is an important task for several information or content retrieval tasks. In the paper a flexible framework for research purposes is introduced for testing features, metrics, distances and indexing structures. The core part of the content based retrieval system is the LHI-tree, a disk-based index scheme for fast retrieval of multimodal features. Additionally, we compare LHI-tree to FLANN, an effective implementation of ANN search and show that LHI-tree gives similar list of retrieved images.

When practice and policy collide: Child welfare workers' perceptions of investigation processes

This qualitative study examines variability in practices surrounding Child Protective Services (CPS) investigations regarding the allegations of child maltreatment. Working under the auspices of a community-research collaboration with Department of Human Services officials, university researchers conducted a series of focus groups with CPS caseworkers in a state that was under court-ordered consent decree to improve child welfare investigations. Focus groups with caseworkers sought to better understand caseworkers' common investigative practices and their perceptions of best practices in conducting child welfare investigations. Two main areas were noted for improvement: (1) the need for ongoing training of CPS workers, particularly at the stage of initial intake of the allegations of maltreatment, and cross-training of police and hospital staff who regularly work with CPS, and (2) implementation of an improved risk assessment tool. These recommendations are discussed in detail.

Power photonics for Green Earth –strategic approach to the better life–

We have investigated the pathway to realize Laser Inertial (LIFE) as the primary energy for society, which is vital for the Green Earth (environmentally sustainable economic growth and prosperity for all mankind). The next step toward the fusion power plant is the engineering development of the elements and the integrated system of the LIFE. An integrated system development will open new applications to sciences and industries in many fields such as high energy density physics, advanced manufacturing, nuclear material processing, space, and medical engineerings, with the deployment of high rep-rate, high-average and peak power lasers. Laser fusion research started soon after the invention of laser. The purpose was clearly fixed on the development of new energy sources, which are clean, safe and abundant, in order to provide the primary energy for the future. The physics of laser-driven implosion and compression have been thoroughly investigated within an active collaborative and interactive international research community. We achieved temperatures of 10 8 K which is necessary for abundant fusion reactions to occur and densities of 10 3 times compression over the initial pellet density required for energy gain in separate experiments at ILE, Osaka University. We are now at the new phase where the fusion ignition, burn and energy gain are expected to be achieved with the Mega-Joule lasers such as NIF of the U.S. and LMJ of France in the time frame of 2011∼2015. Along with the research activities of world-leading laboratories into the physics of the implosion, the International Atomic Agency (IAEA) has been promoting international collaborative projects for the development of Inertial Energy. The first systematic project was performed taking the collaboration of more than 80 experts of the world. The result was published as a comprehensive book of 450 pages titled as Energy from Inertial Fusion in 1995. Since then, two successive Coordinative Research Projects (CRP) have been undertaken, the first entitled CRP on the Elements of Power Plant Design from 2000 to 2004 and the second entitled CRP on the Integrated Approach to Inertial Power Plants from 2006 to 2010. The progresses of high energy density physics being stimulated by IFE research and the high average power laser engineering of short pulse for IFE driver, are opening and creating new science opportunities and industries in material processing, radiation sources, charged particles and neutron sources, new material creation, and medical applications. These will provide important new technologies for the green earth and sustainable growth for the 21st Century. It appears that we are entering the new Era of Photonics.

Industry influenced evidence production in collaborative research communities: A network analysis

ObjectiveTo measure the relative influence that industry authors have on collaborative research communities and evidence production. Study Design and SettingUsing 22 commonly prescribed drugs, 6,711 randomized controlled trials (RCTs), and 28,104 authors, 22 collaboration networks were constructed and analyzed. The directly industry-affiliated (DIA) authors were identified in the networks according to their published affiliations. Measures of influence (network centrality) and impact (citations) were determined for every author. Network-level measures of community structure and collaborative preference were used to further characterize the groups. ResultsSix percent (1,741 of 28,104) of authors listed a direct affiliation with the manufacturer of a drug evaluated in the RCT. These authors received significantly more citations (P<0.05 in 19 networks) and were significantly more central in the networks (P<0.05 in 20 networks). The networks show that DIA authors tend to have greater reach in the networks and collaborate more often with non-DIA authors despite a preference toward their own group. Potential confounders include publication bias, trial sizes, and conclusions. ConclusionsIndustry-based authors are more central in their networks and are deeply embedded within highly connected drug research communities. As a consequence, they have the potential to influence information flow in the production of evidence.

Power Photonics for Green Earth- Strategic Approach to the Better Life -

We have investigated the pathway to realize Laser Inertial (LIFE) as the primary energy for society, which is vital for the Green Earth (environmentally sustainable economic growth and prosperity for all mankind). The next step toward the fusion power plant is the engineering development of the elements and the integrated system of the LIFE. An integrated system development will open new applications to sciences and industries in many fields such as high energy density physics, advanced manufacturing, nuclear material processing, space, and medical engineerings, with the deployment of high rep-rate, high-average and peak power lasers. Laser fusion research started soon after the invention of laser. The purpose was clearly fixed on the development of new energy sources, which are clean, safe and abundant, in order to provide the primary energy for the future. The physics of laser-driven implosion and compression have been thoroughly investigated within an active collaborative and interactive international research community. We achieved temperatures of 10 8 K which is necessary for abundant fusion reactions to occur and densities of 10 3 times compression over the initial pellet density required for energy gain in separate experiments at ILE, Osaka University. We are now at the new phase where the fusion ignition, burn and energy gain are expected to be achieved with the Mega-Joule lasers such as NIF of the U.S. and LMJ of France in the time frame of 2011∼2015. Along with the research activities of world-leading laboratories into the physics of the implosion, the International Atomic Agency (IAEA) has been promoting international collaborative projects for the development of Inertial Energy. The first systematic project was performed taking the collaboration of more than 80 experts of the world. The result was published as a comprehensive book of 450 pages titled as Energy from Inertial Fusion in 1995. Since then, two successive Coordinative Research Projects (CRP) have been undertaken, the first entitled CRP on the Elements of Power Plant Design from 2000 to 2004 and the second entitled CRP on the Integrated Approach to Inertial Power Plants from 2006 to 2010. The progresses of high energy density physics being stimulated by IFE research and the high average power laser engineering of short pulse for IFE driver, are opening and creating new science opportunities and industries in material processing, radiation sources, charged particles and neutron sources, new material creation, and medical applications. These will provide important new technologies for the green earth and sustainable growth for the 21st Century. It appears that we are entering the new Era of Photonics.

Applied Archaeology and Community Collaboration: Uncovering the Past and Empowering the Present

The last two decades have witnessed archaeology's increasing concern about its position and relevance in the modern world. This dilemma was the catalyst for the widespread practice of public outreach and education. To date, the impact of public archaeology, although positive, has not been as great as one would have wished. In light of this, the discipline is currently undergoing another transformation. Recent developments demonstrate the potential for the knowledge produced through archaeological inquiries to be part of the discourse concerning contemporary social issues and public policy. The goal of this article is to make a case for archaeology's move beyond the ideology of stewardship and into a more active environment framed by applied anthropological theory and community collaboration. This article exemplifies this position through the author's community-collaborative research program in Baltimore County, Maryland.

Knowledge sharing and collaboration in translational research, and the DC-THERA Directory

Biomedical research relies increasingly on large collections of data sets and knowledge whose generation, representation and analysis often require large collaborative and interdisciplinary efforts. This dimension of ‘big data’ research calls for the development of computational tools to manage such a vast amount of data, as well as tools that can improve communication and access to information from collaborating researchers and from the wider community. Whenever research projects have a defined temporal scope, an additional issue of data management arises, namely how the knowledge generated within the project can be made available beyond its boundaries and life-time. DC-THERA is a European ‘Network of Excellence’ (NoE) that spawned a very large collaborative and interdisciplinary research community, focusing on the development of novel immunotherapies derived from fundamental research in dendritic cell immunobiology. In this article we introduce the DC-THERA Directory, which is an information system designed to support knowledge management for this research community and beyond. We present how the use of metadata and Semantic Web technologies can effectively help to organize the knowledge generated by modern collaborative research, how these technologies can enable effective data management solutions during and beyond the project lifecycle, and how resources such as the DC-THERA Directory fit into the larger context of e-science.

Family and Community

In this article, the authors explore the consequences of an American 1930s classic anthropological study for a contemporary rural community in the west of Ireland. The contribution of family, kin, and community relations to sustaining a rural way of life was the primary focus of Arensberg and Kimball’s study of Irish farm families published as Family and Community in Ireland. Through the frame of a collaborative community research project with an artist, sociologist, and the descendents of the families written about, we present an account of a research project based on Kimball’s 1930s field diary that provided an opportunity for community members to tell their own story of family and community in the 21st century. Deploying a narrative inquiry approach, the power of local stories to interrupt dominant narratives of family and community is explored.

A Practical Framework for Navigating Ethical Challenges in Collaborative Community Research.

To effectively mobilize community-based organizations (CBOs) and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in research, important ethical issues must be addressed. A memorandum of understanding (MOU), providing a framework and a tool to be used for establishing effective community-research partnerships, was developed by the Community Collaboration Core (CCC) of the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies. Aims of the CCC include: (1) Initiating and sustaining successful partnerships in HIV prevention research in areas of sexuality, gender, mental health, and of mutual benefit to communities; (2) Advancing the science of collaboration among researchers, practitioners, and government in HIV prevention. Developed and assessed over a two-year period by researchers, CBO/NGO and public health representatives, this MOU can be used by potential research and community partners to address the most important issues early in a collaborative research project. Clarifying essential roles, responsibilities, and relationships, establishing trust and transparency in that process, can guide collaborators in planning the important steps for beginning and sustaining an ethical and successful research project.

Portals for collaborative research communities: two distinguished case studies

AbstractCase study research excels at bringing us to an understanding of a complex issue or object and can extend experience or add strength to what is already known through previous research. The research work summarized by this paper discusses two different case studies in the field of portals for collaborative research communities, in particular VectorBase and BGA‐Space. VectorBase at its core is a scientific database that focuses on search, data mining and offers multiple integrated bioinformatics tools for analyzing and browsing genomic and related data. BGA‐Space focuses on capturing semantics from scientists during processing of scientific experiments as well as preserving the full life cycle of scientific data to enable their reuse. The two case studies involve heavy research and the application of theories, concepts, and knowledge commonly discussed in the targeted field. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Building virtual collaborative research community using knowledge management approach

Many online communities nowadays are emphasized more on peer interactions and information sharing among members; very few online communities are built with knowledge management in nature supported by knowledge management system (KMS). This study aims to present a community of practice on how to effectively adopt a knowledge management system (KMS) to neutralize a cyber collaborative learning community for a research lab in a higher education setting. A longitudinal case for 7 years was used to analyze the retention and extension of participants’ community of practice experiences. Interviews were conducted for the comparison between experiences and theories. It was found that the transformations of tacit and explicit knowledge are in accordance with the framework of Nonaka’s model of knowledge management from which we elicit the strategies and suggestions to the adoption and implementation of virtual collaborative research community supported by KMS.

Cutaneous Lymphoma Summit 2009

Cutaneous Lymphoma Summit 2009 was held in New York City on October 9-11, 2009. The idea for the Summit was generated three years ago by the leadership of the Cutaneous Lymphoma Foundation, whose vision was that the cutaneous lymphoma community would benefit from an inclusive gathering to identify unifying issues important to all stakeholders. This vision is captured in the Summit’s tagline: “community, cooperation, cure.” The major goal of the Summit was to serve as a forum for the discussion of bold ideas, explore controversial or poorly developed areas of research, and spark lively discussion among leading investigators from both within and outside the field. We hoped to broaden the cutaneous lymphoma community’s scientific horizons and enhance the application of new concepts in immunology, genetics, pharmacology, and imaging. The Cutaneous Lymphoma Foundation is grateful to the leadership of the United States Cutaneous Lymphoma Consortium (USCLC), the International Society of Cutaneous Lymphomas (ISCL), and the Cutaneous Lymphoma Working Group of the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) for their participation in the program. The following pages present critical topics addressed by faculty who participated in the Summit. This issue also contains an editorial by the Summit’s scientific program co-chairs, Drs. Stuart Lessin and Pierluigi Porcu. It serves as a white paper that identifies important needs and opportunities in research, clinical care, and education. These represent strategic targets to be rapidly tackled by the cutaneous lymphoma community and to be reassessed annually for progress. It is my hope that these proceedings and white paper will spark the creation of a more collaborative research community and that its emergent ideas and commitments will garner greater attention and resources from the public sphere, thus offering greater hope to patients and families. My gratitude and thanks are extended to all who contributed to Cutaneous Lymphoma Summit 2009 and these proceedings.