Coordinated Group Activity Research Articles

The Un-meeting approach to stimulate collaborative adult learning: an application for clinical research professionals.

We used a Zoom Un-meeting as an educational approach to provide experienced clinical research professional (CRP) adult learners a collaborative learning space to learn more about current issues for academic medical center (AMC) clinical research workforce development and collaborate on solution finding. CRPs operationalize the conduct of clinical trials and represent a significant brain trust for the Clinical and Translational Science (CTSA) consortium hubs with their vast knowledge base, extensive experience, understanding of relevant institutional policy, organizational culture, and clinical research operations. Un-meetings are an intentionally organized and coordinated group activity that encourages participants to focus on a topic and incorporate an open flow of ideas through brainstorming and an open discussion format, setting the stage for future collaborative action. We divided topics into a series of six consecutive monthly Un-meeting Zoom workshops. Ultimately, one resulting output from the meeting was the Center for Leading Innovation and Collaborations (CLIC) synergy paper award to support continued collaborative work. Currently, work teams have emerged to analyze qualitative data from brainstorming and breakout session recordings and to identify small-group activities. We describe this adult learning tool as valuable for exploring issues of AMC CRP professional development. This approach encouraged creative/critical thinking and opportunities for leadership, team science, and problem-solving among participants.

Do chewing cues from drywood termites mediate recruiting for wood colonization?

AbstractDrywood termites, Cryptotermes brevis (Walker) (Isoptera: Kalotermitidae), are eusocial insects living and foraging in groups inside pieces of wood, in which they perform a suite of behavioral traits ranging from individual to coordinated group activities. Vibroacoustic cues play important roles in behavioral mediation during defense and foraging activities. However, termite societies also exhibit other relevant behaviors, including substrate selection for colony establishment, which has received little attention. Therefore, we tested the hypothesis that vibrational cues produced by termites inside pieces of drywood influence wood recruiting of conspecifics using dichotomous choice tests. In addition, we assessed whether the choice affects colony success (i.e., termite survival and wood consumption). Two behavioral activities were recognized among drywood termites colonizing wood galleries – walking and chewing. However, only the chewing cues overcome background noise, allowing acoustic signal characterization and playback tests; thus, they were the focus of our study. Overall, drywood termite groups exhibit random choice among wood‐testing unities, indicating that the chewing cues from the natural and/or playback signals are not used as a social trigger to mediate conspecific recruiting for wood preference and colonization. Nonetheless, the establishment of termite colonies in infested vs. non‐infested wood pieces led to better termite performance in the former, exhibiting higher wood consumption and survival.

Utilizing Zoom Breakout Rooms to Expose Preclerkship Medical Students to TeleMedicine Encounters.

Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) presented various challenges as the Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences (OSU-CHS) campus closed to students in response to COVID-19 mitigation efforts in late March 2020. While some classes transitioned easily to virtual platforms already in place, such as learning management systems and the lecture recording software, other classes that involved coordinated group activities did not have as many suitable alternatives. One College of Osteopathic Medicine (COM) class utilized the teleconferencing tool Zoom. Zoom’s breakout rooms and waiting room features were used to facilitate a clinical interviewing skills lab and telemedicine-type encounter with standardized patients. We were able to successfully designate groups of approximately 10 students into three rooms, amongst which the standardized patients moved at set intervals. Faculty facilitators participated in each room to guide students, and one support staff member served as host to manage the technical aspects of the overall meeting. We found this approach to be a successful alternative to live group activities and a worthwhile opportunity to expose preclerkship students to telemedicine.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s40670-020-01113-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Behavior of mice aboard the International Space Station

Interest in space habitation has grown dramatically with planning underway for the first human transit to Mars. Despite a robust history of domestic and international spaceflight research, understanding behavioral adaptation to the space environment for extended durations is scant. Here we report the first detailed behavioral analysis of mice flown in the NASA Rodent Habitat on the International Space Station (ISS). Following 4-day transit from Earth to ISS, video images were acquired on orbit from 16- and 32-week-old female mice. Spaceflown mice engaged in a full range of species-typical behaviors. Physical activity was greater in younger flight mice as compared to identically-housed ground controls, and followed the circadian cycle. Within 9–11 days after launch, younger (but not older), mice began to exhibit distinctive circling or ‘race-tracking’ behavior that evolved into a coordinated group activity. Organized group circling behavior unique to spaceflight may represent stereotyped motor behavior, rewarding effects of physical exercise, or vestibular sensation produced via self-motion. Affording mice the opportunity to grab and run in the RH resembles physical activities that the crew participate in routinely. Our approach yields a useful analog for better understanding human responses to spaceflight, providing the opportunity to assess how physical movement influences responses to microgravity.

Coordination Event Detection and Initiator Identification in Time Series Data

Behavior initiation is a form of leadership and is an important aspect of social organization that affects the processes of group formation, dynamics, and decision-making in human societies and other social animal species. In this work, we formalize the C oordination I nitiator I nference P roblem and propose a simple yet powerful framework for extracting periods of coordinated activity and determining individuals who initiated this coordination, based solely on the activity of individuals within a group during those periods. The proposed approach, given arbitrary individual time series, automatically (1) identifies times of coordinated group activity, (2) determines the identities of initiators of those activities, and (3) classifies the likely mechanism by which the group coordination occurred, all of which are novel computational tasks. We demonstrate our framework on both simulated and real-world data: trajectories tracking of animals as well as stock market data. Our method is competitive with existing global leadership inference methods but provides the first approaches for local leadership and coordination mechanism classification. Our results are consistent with ground-truthed biological data and the framework finds many known events in financial data which are not otherwise reflected in the aggregate NASDAQ index. Our method is easily generalizable to any coordinated time series data from interacting entities.

Quorum Sensing Protects Pseudomonas aeruginosa against Cheating by Other Species in a Laboratory Coculture Model.

Many species of bacteria use a cell-cell communication system called quorum sensing (QS) to coordinate group activities. QS systems frequently regulate the production of exoproducts. Some of these products, such as proteases, are "public goods" that are shared among the population and vulnerable to cheating by nonproducing members of the population. Because the QS system of the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa regulates several public goods, it can serve as a model for studying cooperation. Bacteria also commonly regulate antimicrobial production through QS. In this study, we focused on the hypothesis that QS-regulated antimicrobials may be important for P. aeruginosa to protect against cheating by another bacterial species, Burkholderia multivorans. We assessed laboratory cocultures of P. aeruginosa and B. multivorans and investigated the importance of three P. aeruginosa QS-regulated antimicrobials, hydrogen cyanide, rhamnolipids, and phenazines, for competition. We found that P. aeruginosa dominates cocultures with B. multivorans and that the three antimicrobials together promote P. aeruginosa competitiveness, with hydrogen cyanide contributing the greatest effect. We show that these QS-regulated antimicrobials are also critical for P. aeruginosa to prevent B. multivorans from cheating under nutrient conditions where both species require a P. aeruginosa quorum-regulated protease for growth. Together our results highlight the importance of antimicrobials in protecting cooperating populations from exploitation by other species that can act as cheaters. Cooperative behaviors are threatened by social cheating, wherein individuals do not produce but nonetheless benefit from shared public goods. Bacteria have been shown to use several genetic mechanisms to restrain the emergence of cheaters from within the population, but public goods might also be used by other bacterial species in the vicinity. We demonstrate that a public good produced by Pseudomonas aeruginosa can be used by another species, Burkholderia multivorans, to obtain carbon and energy. We also show that P. aeruginosa antimicrobials that are coregulated with the public good prevent invasion by the cheating species. Our results demonstrate that cross-species cheating can occur and that coregulation of public goods with antimicrobials may stabilize cooperative behavior in mixed microbial communities.

BotGrab: A negative reputation system for botnet detection

Botnets continue to be used by attackers to perform various malicious activities on the Internet. Over the past years, many botnet detection techniques have been proposed; however, most of them cannot detect botnets in an early stage of their lifecycle, or they often depend on a specific command and control protocol. In this paper, we propose BotGrab, a general botnet detection system that considers both malicious activities and the history of coordinated group activities in the network to identify bot-infected hosts. BotGrab tracks suspected hosts participating in some coordinated group activities and calculates a negative reputation score for each of them based on the history of their participation in these activities. A suspected host will be identified as being bot-infected if it has a high negative reputation score or performs some malicious activities while having a low negative reputation score. We demonstrate the effectiveness of BotGrab to detect various botnets including HTTP-, IRC-, and P2P-based botnets using a testbed network consisting of some bot-infected hosts.

Effects of role assignment in concept mapping mediated small group learning

Group interaction is a key component of group-based learning. However, its implementation in educational practice is inefficient. Previous studies have discussed the use of concept mapping as a knowledge representation tool to facilitate group communication and trigger shared cognition. Deficiencies in the collaborative use of concept mapping have also been recognized, mainly related to the coordination of group activities, especially in distance groups. Previous studies have proposed roles with different functions to coordinate group activities in concept mapping. However, there is no systematic view of role assignment and there have been no empirical studies examining the effectiveness of the role-based approach. This study addressed this research gap by assigning the roles of cognitive leader, metacognitive leader, and socio-emotional leader to students in concept mapping mediated small group learning. The study demonstrated the design and implementation of the role-based approach in an online learning environment. The evaluation results evidenced the feasibility of the role-based approach and its usefulness in improving socio-emotional experiences in small group learning. The insignificant effects of the approach on cognitive and metacognitive aspects of group interaction indicated the need to investigate the strategies for role assignment and implementation of role duties to determine whether and how these issues might affect the effectiveness of the role-based approach.

4-Quinolones: smart phones of the microbial world.

The cellular telephone has revolutionized the way in which humans communicate. Since its invention, this device has evolved into the multifunctional “smart phone”. The smart phone provides us with not only a means of communication but also a useful toolkit for managing our daily lives. For example, the smart phone enables us to check email, take photographs, and get directions, although it remains primarily a communication device. This review will discuss small molecules that serve as bacterial “smart phones”, allowing bacteria to not only communicate but also monitor their external environment. The finding that bacteria communicate to organize group behaviors has revolutionized the way we view these unicellular organisms. The mechanism of bacterial communication was elucidated in the marine bacterium Vibrio fischeri and since has been likened to communication mechanisms used by eukaryotes. Bacterial communication, or quorum sensing (QS), occurs via the sequential production, accumulation, and sensing of small hormone-like molecules, resulting in altered gene expression at defined cell densities. By using QS to regulate gene expression, bacteria coordinate group activities that may be more effective when carried out by a large population. QS is both ecologically and medically relevant. For example, QS controls behaviors as diverse as bioluminescence and virulence factor production (as reviewed in ref 2).1,2 One major group of QS signaling molecules is the heterocyclic 4-quinolone/quinolines (4Qs). 4Qs have been primarily studied in the Gram-negative opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. P. aeruginosa produces two primary 4Q QS molecules, 2-heptyl-4(1H)-quinolone (HHQ)3–5 and 2-heptyl-3-hydroxy-4(1H)-quinolone (Pseudomonas quinolone signal; PQS; Figure 1).6 In addition to HHQ and PQS, P. aeruginosa produces >50 other 4Qs,3,7 many of which remain functionally uncharacterized. Interestingly, 4Qs produced by P. aeruginosa share the basic 4-quinolone backbone of commercially synthesized quinolone antibiotics8,9 (Figure 1). Indeed, P. aeruginosa produces 4-hydroxy-2-heptylquinoline-N-oxide (HQNO), a 4Q that possesses antibiotic activity,10,11 though its mechanism of action differs from synthetic quinolone antibiotics.12 The purpose of this review is to discuss 4Q-based QS systems, biosynthesis of 4Qs, regulation of 4Q biosynthesis, 4Qs and virulence, and 4Qs in biological roles other than signaling. We will not discuss how 4Qs interact with iron since this topic has been recently reviewed (see refs 13–15). Additionally, since bacterial 4Qs have been recently reviewed (see refs 14 and 16), we will also describe properties of commercial 4Q antibiotics and discuss recent literature that implicates these molecules in signaling.17,18 Finally, we will speculate on new biological roles for 4Qs. This review covers literature published between 1945 and 2009. Open in a separate window Figure 1 Structures of common QS signals and synthetic quinolone antibiotics.

The dynamics of intention in collaborative activity

An adequate formulation of collective intentionality is crucial for understanding group activity and for modeling the mental state of participants in such activities. Although work on collective intentionality in philosophy, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science has many points of agreement, several key issues remain under debate. This paper argues that the dynamics of intention – in particular, the inter-related processes of plan-related group decision making and intention updating – play crucial roles in an explanation of collective intentionality. Furthermore, it is in these dynamic aspects that coordinated group activity differs most from individual activity. The paper specifies a model of the dynamics of agent intentions in the context of collaborative activity. Its integrated treatment of group decision making and coordinated updating of group-related intentions fills an important gap in prior accounts of collective intentionality, thus helping to resolve a long-standing debate about the nature of intentions in group activity. The paper also defines an architecture for collaboration-capable computer agents that satisfies the constraints of the model and is a natural extension of the standard architecture for resource-bounded agents operating as individuals. The new architecture is both more principled and more complete than prior architectures for collaborative multi-agent systems.

Listening in on bacteria: acyl-homoserine lactone signalling.

Bacterial cell-to-cell signalling has emerged as a new area in microbiology. Individual bacterial cells communicate with each other and co-ordinate group activities. Although a lot of detail is known about the mechanisms of a few well-characterized bacterial communication systems, other systems have been discovered only recently. Bacterial intercellular communication has become a target for the development of new anti-virulence drugs.

Electronic Meeting Systems in Computer Human Interface Design: A Case Study

The increasing economic and practical necessity of groups or teams of individuals working together to accomplish shared objectives can be observed in many diverse organizations (Alvai and Keen, 1989; Kraemer and King, 1988). This trend is reflected in many ways in complex system development environments. For example, the growing emphasis on concurrent engineering practices, and the application of tools that better organize and coordinate engineering efforts across diverse groups (e.g., CASE tools), both require and reflect the need for coordinated group activities. In turn, the growth of group work environments has led to growing interest and need for tools that can support and enhance the effectiveness of group work activities. Such a tool is an electronic meeting system (EMS). This case study reports the effectiveness of an EMS applied as part of a computer-human interface (CHI) design evaluation methodology, in the design of an air traffic control system.

A formal semantics for DAI language NUML

Traditional AI systems are brittle in the sense that they fail miserably when presented with problems even slightly outside of their limited range of expertise. A powerful, extensible strategy of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) for overcoming such bounds is to put the system in a society of systems. So the ability to coordinate group activities of individuals and to communicate between each other is necessary for a language describing DAI systems. Agent-oriented language NUML is such a language. It is a specific kind of object-oriented language. To give formal semantics to NUML, there is the problem to formalise object-oriented programming paradigm which is still open. The theory of higher-order π-calculus is a concurrent computation model with sufficient capability, which provides us a mathematical tool to do the formalization. This paper tries to use higher-order π-calculus to formalise NUML.

Groups Beliefs: A Conception for Analyzing Group Structure, Processes, and Behavior.

"Individuals who live in groups hold common beliefs which define their reality, not only as persons, but also as group members. This reality becomes especially important when group members become aware that they share beliefs and are convinced that these beliefs characterize them as a group. In this case common beliefs become group beliefs." With this statement, Dr. Bar-Tal begins his far-reaching analysis of beliefs as a group phenomenon. Group beliefs are shown to have important behavioral, cognitive, and affective implications for group members and the group as a whole. They may contribute to the behavioral direction a group takes, coordinate group activities, determine the intensity and involvement of group members, and influence the way group members affect the leaders. This book introduces and articulates the implications of a new concept of group beliefs, shedding new light on the structure and processes of groups, focusing on such phenomena as group formation, subgrouping, splits, mergence and group disintegration. By taking an interdisciplinary approach, this integrative conception opens new avenues to the study and understanding of group behavior.

Group beliefs: a conception for analyzing group structure, processes, and behavior

Individuals who live in groups hold common beliefs which define their reality, not only as persons, but also as group members. This reality becomes especially important when group members become aware that they share beliefs and are convinced that these beliefs characterize them as a group. In this case common beliefs become group beliefs. With this statement, Dr. Bar-Tal begins his far-reaching analysis of beliefs as a group phenomenon. Group beliefs are shown to have important behavioral, cognitive, and affective implications for group members and the group as a whole. They may contribute to the behavioral direction a group takes, coordinate group activities, determine the intensity and involvement of group members, and influence the way group members affect the leaders. This book introduces and articulates the implications of a new concept of group beliefs, shedding new light on the structure and processes of groups, focusing on such phenomena as group formation, subgrouping, splits, mergence and group disintegration. By taking an interdisciplinary approach, this integrative conception opens new avenues to the study and understanding of group behavior.

The engineering syndicate study

The paper describes a small-group method of teaching engineering students which encourages innovation and gives experience of tackling design problems. It emphasises the importance of co-ordinated group activity. It helps the development of communicative skills and gives opportunities for exercising judgement and decision making. It has the advantages of gaining excellent student motivation and assisting a closer liaison with the engineering industry.

Exploring Training Methods for Dissociating Muscle Activity in Arm Prosthesis Control Applications

The level of motor skills regain of an arm prosthesis wearer is directly related to the precision and reliability with which he can select, initiate, guide, and terminate the movements of the mechanism with appropriate control musculature. To develop the necessary control skills, special muscle training is necessary. Utilization of any muscle in the shoulder girdle or general trunk region depends on its dissociation from group action in order to achieve isolated function since such muscles normally are used only in coordinated group activity. The following conditions must be met to achieve voluntary control over the contraction of a selected muscle: ( a ) facilitation of contraction and simultaneous inhibition of activity in synergsts and/or antagonists; ( b ) inhibition of conuaction during activity in synergists and/or antagonists; and ( c ) graded control over contraction and relaxation. One approach to meet these requirements was to utilize the concept of non-plasticity of the mature CNS (Sperry, 1943). Motor denervation of a muscle and its re-innervation with a nerve which formerly carried functional messages as, for example, lift forearm, seemed to provide a means for associating voluntary initiation of muscle contraction with a prosthetically meaningful movement. To this end, the following pilot experiment was conducted on two monkeys. Monkey A, a male Macaca mulatta (rhesus monkey) who was born in the UCLA vivarium in 1957, was two yr. old at the time of surgery and weighed 3.4 kg. Monkey B was a female Cyne malagus who was captured in the jungles of Borneo and shipped to UCLA in 1959 at an approximate age of 2 years. The animal was about 2Y2 years old at the time of surgery and weighed 3.7 kg. A branch of the musculocutaneous nerve supplying the right biceps was transferred and anastomosed to the proximal stump of the severed medial and anterior thoracic nerves. EMG records were obtained ac intervals over a period of approximately 12 months. Slight pectoralis contraction became evident six months postoperatively and gradually increased to normal suength in both animals. Monkey B showed the expected synchronous discharge patterns in right