Distributed Collaboration Research Articles

Good practices in designing a communication channel architecture for secure async flexible distributed collaboration

Abstract In this paper we present a set of good practices in the design of a security-centric architecture for a Communication Channel that can be used to secure a Loosely-Coupled distributed platform, over unreliable communication mediums. The proposed practices are derived from designing a complete architecture that is modular and designed to support principles of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the common functional requirements of a wide range of applications, including cybersecurity, smart power grids and industrial Internet of Things (IoT). The architecture was developed and implemented as part of the BIECO project, and is based around open standards such as Open Platform Communications United Architecture (OPC-UA). The key feature of the architecture is that it enables secure asynchronous near-real-time communication between a large number of nodes in a multimodal setup, without the need of any Service to know its place within the tool-chain. Based on our experience with building this system and based on the good results obtained, we are presenting a list of lessons learnt, recommendations for better communication channel modules within loosely coupled distributed systems.

Digital Twin Collaborative Platforms: Applications to Humans-in-the-Loop Crafting of Urban Areas

The opportunity to foresee how a physical system might work in advance, resorting to its digital model, explains the general attractiveness of digital twins. The use of digital twins, especially in the manufacturing context, encourages the investigation of the benefits they may bring in many circumstances, ranging from medical to commercial applications. In this work, however, we do not introduce yet another field where digital twins may be applied but, instead, propose digital twins as part of a convergence of technologies that may be put to good use to foster advanced distributed collaboration platforms to support humans in the loop. To clarify our proposal, we contextualize the proposed methodology by providing a conceptual framework related to a Virtual Hackable City, where we explain the advantages of such an approach.

A digital thread-driven distributed collaboration mechanism between digital twin manufacturing units

The trialing of new products in production typically suffers from quality and productivity problems because of immature manufacturing processes. As an efficient virtual-real interaction technology, digital twin technology can optimize the manufacturing process adaptively in a single station. However, existing digital twin systems lack an effective collaboration mechanism between manufacturing units, thus failing to optimize the overall manufacturing processes dynamically. This paper proposes a practical collaboration theory and methodology between digital twin manufacturing units. To overcome the above challenges, this digital thread-driven method models the manufacturing tasks by heterogeneous information network to analyze the product quality information during the manufacturing process, and adjusts the subsequent manufacturing tasks according to the analysis results. The collaboration between manufacturing units forms a stable and reliable operation mode for improving production efficiency during the whole manufacturing process. The graph-based manufacturing task model can help analyze the machining and assembly process based on the digital thread, distinguish the error sources of products, and dynamically reconstruct production tasks. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed method is verified by a case of a crank and connecting rod mechanism in a manufacturing workshop.

DRTP: A Disruption Resilient Hop-by-Hop Transport Protocol for Synchrophasors Measurement in Electric Transmission Grids

In a modern electric power transmission grid, the phasor measurement unit requires a reliable transport of its sampled statistics with a low end-to-end failure rate (EEFR) to ensure the accuracy of the grid state estimation. However, EEFR can be deteriorated by packet losses due to multiple link disruptions in the primary forwarding path (PP). To address that, we investigate a novel disruption resilient transport protocol (DRTP) enabling hop-by-hop retransmission utilizing the redundant subpaths (RSPs) available for the PP to increase reliability. It addresses the new distributed collaboration issue under multiple link failures to avoid cache mismatching. These have not been considered by the existing approaches. The DRTP was evaluated in the ndnSIM simulator through both the typical and general routes that are constructed from real transmission grids. The numerical results demonstrate that it has a significant advantage in reducing the EEFR with a low end-to-end delivery time under serious link disruptions.

THE POSITIVE IMPACT OF AGILE RETROSPECTIVES ON THE COLLABORATION OF DISTRIBUTED DEVELOPMENT TEAMS – A PRACTICAL APPROACH ON THE EXAMPLE OF BOSCH ENGINEERING GMBH

AbstractTo counteract competitive pressure, increasing customer requirements and growing product complexity successful distributed collaboration in product development is vital. Companies have to face new challenges, such as efficiency losses in communication. To overcome these challenges agile working practices, such as agile retrospectives, could be beneficial. The objective of this scientific work is to evaluate the benefit of agile working practices on the example of agile retrospectives, for the improvement of collaboration in distributed development teams. Based on literature analysis, qualitative and quantitative expert interviews following the DRM by Blessing and Chakrabarti, this scientific work shows that agile working practices have a high potential to improve distributed collaboration. To address this potential, several virtual agile retrospectives are developed and conducted within a distributed team at Bosch Engineering GmbH. The evaluation of this approach results in a high potential of agile retrospectives indicating an improvement tendency. Especially iteratively implemented virtual agile retrospectives have a positive impact on successful distributed collaboration.

The Impact of COVID-19 in Collaborative Programming. Understanding the Needs of Undergraduate Computer Science Students

Collaborative learning activities have become a common practice in current university studies due to the implantation of the EHEA. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a radical and abrupt change in the teaching–learning model used in most universities, and in the way students’ group work is carried out. Given this new situation, our interest is focused on discovering how computer science students have approached group programming tasks. For this purpose, we have designed a cross-sectional pilot study to explore, from both social and technological points of view, how students carried out their group programming activities during the shutdown of universities, how they are doing them now, when social distance must be maintained, and what they have missed in both situations. The results of the study indicate that during the imposed confinement, the students adopted a programming model based on work division or distributed peer programming, and very few made use of synchronous distributed collaboration tools. After the lockdown, the students mostly opted for a model based on collaborative programming and there was an increased use of synchronous distributed collaboration tools. The specific communication, synchronization, and coordination functionalities they considered most useful or necessary were also analyzed. Among the desirable features included in a software for synchronous distributed programming, the students considered that having an audio-channel can be very useful and, possibly, the most agile method to communicate. The video signal is not considered as very necessary, being in many cases rather a source of distraction, while textual communication through a chat, to which they are very accustomed, is also well valued. In addition, version control and the possibility of recovering previous states of the practical projects were highly appreciated by the students, and they considered it necessary to record the individual contributions of each member of the team to the result.

Dreaming of immersive interactions to navigate forced distributed collaboration during Covid-19

opinion Share on Dreaming of immersive interactions to navigate forced distributed collaboration during Covid-19 Authors: Yekta Bakırlıoğlu Koç University Koç UniversityView Profile , María Laura Ramírez Galleguillos Koç University Koç UniversityView Profile , Aykut Coşkun Koç University Koç UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 27Issue 5September - October 2020 pp 20–21https://doi.org/10.1145/3414462Published:01 September 2020Publication History 3citation867DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations3Total Downloads867Last 12 Months177Last 6 weeks16 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Reviewing the Contributing Factors and Benefits of Distributed Collaboration

Distributed collaboration has become increasingly common across domains ranging from software development to information processing, the creative arts, and entertainment As of early 2020, distributed collaboration has entered the limelight as the COVID-19 pandemic has forced employees across the world to work from home However, while researchers have applied myriad terms to define these operations, we first address this issue by defining distributed collaboration in a way that represents all its forms Existing research has identified several factors that contribute to distributed collaborations’ success Yet, researchers and practitioners typically discuss these factors in modular theoretical terms, which means that they often struggle to identify and synthesize literature that spans multiple domains and perspectives In this paper, we systematically review the literature to synthesize core findings into one amalgamated model This model categorizes the contributing factors for distributed collaboration along two axes 1) whether they are social or material and 2) whether they are endemic or relational We also explicitly discuss the relationships between factors in the model The model further links these contributing factors to different collaborative outcomes, specifically mutual learning, relationship building, communication, task completion speed, access to skilled personnel, and cost savings © 2020 by the Association for Information Systems

Harnessing writers' potential through distributed collaboration: A pedagogical approach for supporting student learning in multimodal composition

In response to the widely acknowledged challenge of instructor expertise in multimodal composition (MC) teaching, our article discusses a pedagogical approach called distributed collaboration (DC)—an approach that facilitates collaboration among specialists with varied expertise (e.g., new media specialists, software specialists, community members, local professionals, student teams) in an effort to provide L1 and L2 writers with the support required to deepen their multimodal literacies, develop communicative expertise, and enhance the quality of their multimodal texts. To illustrate the ways that students' multimodal writing knowledge, English language learning, and multimodal texts might be improved through distributed collaboration, our article profiles a graduate-level course in which student writers were tasked with composing multimodal texts for an on-campus program. In sharing our findings, we hope to provide instructors of English language teaching (ELT) and L1 composition with a generative pedagogical approach for harnessing writers’ full potential in MC projects.

Visualizing Risk: Drawing Together and Pushing Apart with Sociotechnical Practices

This paper examines the relationship between collaborative disaster mapping and conceptions of risk. It looks at the practice of mapmaking during the 2007 wildfires in Southern California to explore sociotechnological issues in creating a shared understanding. By comparing and contrasting how two different, yet intertwined, maps were made this paper focuses on how the sociotechnical acts of alignment necessary for the production of the maps change how risk, threat and uncertainty are approached. One mapmaking practice pulled the actors into a more centralized alignment producing risks related to managing authority and security. The other provided a more distributed collaboration and produced risks related to public trust and consistency. This paper argues that mapmaking is characterized as a messy, distributed network of knowledge production in which the meaning of risk emerges through the collaborations that evolve in making sense of the wildfires, not as an a priori definition.

The Role of Writing in Distributed Collaboration

Distributed collaborations face significant dialogical challenges: sharing knowledge, questioning ideas, and developing new solutions. These challenges are often associated with collaborations' reliance on written communication such as emails and documents, which are not seen as conducive to the rich dialogues necessary for effective collaboration. However, numerous successful distributed collaborations exist despite their sometimes exclusive reliance on written communication. Based on a qualitative study of distributed collaboration in two contexts—an organization effectively coordinating work across two continents and a pair of scientists working together to develop a new theory—we examine how writing supports dialogue, and thus collaboration, among distant partners. Our analysis of the correspondences exchanged in these two historical distributed collaborations identifies four mechanisms of writing—objectifying, contextualizing, specifying, and reflecting—and shows how they support dialogue and so address the dialogical challenges involved in distributed collaboration. These findings are particularly relevant in our era of technology-mediated communication where even collaborations in colocated settings rely extensively on written communication. Our findings advance our understanding of fundamental aspects of distributed collaboration and propose to rethink the value of written communication in enacting dialogue and supporting collaboration at a distance.

Virtual Collaboration Spaces: Bringing Presence to Distributed Collaboration

This paper concerns the use of virtual worlds alongside web technologies for on-line collaborative activities. The potential of this combination of technologies lies in the complementary notions of presence that these technologies offer their users. After discussing the nature of synchronous and asynchronous distributed collaboration, we describe a virtual collaborative environment that has been developed for task-focused communities and support to them through specific problem-solving episodes. This environment has been subject to experiments involving the development and provision of expert advice in the context of the response to a large-scale emergency crisis.

Haptic Communications

Audiovisual communications is at the core of multimedia systems that allow users to interact across distances. It is common understanding that both audio and video are required for high-quality interaction. While audiovisual information provides a user with a satisfactory impression of being present in a remote environment, physical interaction and manipulation is not supported. True immersion into a distant environment and efficient distributed collaboration require the ability to physically interact with remote objects and to literally get in touch with other people. Touching and manipulating objects remotely becomes possible if we augment traditional audiovisual communications by the haptic modality. Haptic communications is a relatively young field of research that has the potential to substantially improve human-human and human-machine interaction. In this paper, we discuss the state-of-the-art in haptic communications both from psychophysical and technical points of view. From a human perception point of view, we mainly focus on the multimodal integration of video and haptics and the improved performance that can be achieved when combining them. We also discuss how the human adapts to discrepancies and synchronization errors between different modalities, a research area which is typically referred to as perceptual learning. From a technical perspective, we address perceptual coding of haptic information and the transmission of haptic data streams over resource-constrained and potentially lossy networks in the presence of unpredictable and time-varying communication delays. In this context, we also discuss the need for objective quality metrics for haptic communication. Throughout the paper, we stress the fact that haptic communications is not meant as a replacement of traditional audiovisual communications but rather as an additional dimension for telepresence that will allow us to advance in our quest for truly immersive communication.

SpACCE: a sophisticated ad hoc cloud computing environment built by server migration to facilitate distributed collaboration

A sophisticated ad hoc cloud computing environment (SpACCE) is proposed to facilitate distributed collaboration. A SpACCE is built according to the needs that occur at any given time on a set of personal, i.e., non-dedicated, computers (PCs) in offices and laboratories, and dynamically migrate a server for application sharing to another PC. Distributed collaboration mainly occurs ad hoc. Although such distributed collaboration requires a large volume of calculation capacity on the server in order to share an application among distributed PCs, conventional cloud computing environments composed of dedicated servers are not suited to flexibly deploying applications ad hoc. A SpACCE deals with this problem by executing server migration on an application-sharing system, CollaboTray, indispensable to share any application without modification. The level of calculation capacity required to execute server migration and the effectiveness of server migration was clarified by building a SpACCE in a university research room.

Enabling secure, distributed collaborations for adrenal tumor research.

Many e-Health strategies rely on the secure integration of datasets that have previously resided in isolated locations, but can now in principle be accessed over the Internet. Of paramount importance in the health domain is the need for the security and privacy of data that is transmitted across these networks. One such collaboration, which spans several specialist centres across France, Germany, Italy and the UK, is ENSAT - the European Network for the Study of Adrenal Tumors. The rarity of the tumors under study means the value of accessing, aggregating and comparing data from many centres is great indeed. However this is especially challenging given that ENSAT require clinical and genomic data to be seamlessly linked, but in such a way that the information governance, ethics and privacy concerns of the patients and associated stakeholders involved are visibly satisfied. Key to this is the clear separation of clinical and genomic data sets and support for rigorous patient-identity protecting access control. This is especially challenging when such data sets exist across different organisational boundaries. In this paper we describe a prototype solution offering a security-oriented tailored portal supported by a layered encryption-driven linkage technology (VANGUARD) that offers precisely such patient-privacy protecting capabilities. We describe the architecture, implementation and use to date of this facility to support the ENSAT adrenal cancer research network.

A Low-Diameter Unstructured P2P Overlay and Corresponding Search Algorithm

Unstructured peer-to-peer networks are frequently used as the overlay in various middleware toolkits for emerging applications, from content distribution to query result caching to distributed collaboration. There are two main aspects in unstructured P2P system researches: (1) How to build a scalable and robust topology and (2) how to present a low cost and more efficient query algorithm. Though normally a search algorithm is independent of the topology, a good topology can greatly improve the performance of the search algorithm. However, most unstructured P2P systems can not combine the robustness with the efficiency and searching accuracy. The main contribution of the paper is to combine the researches on both topology and search algorithm. At first, a low-diameter unstructured P2P overlay called MPO with small world and power-law characteristics is presented. Detailed experiments show that current popular search algorithms can obtain better performances in MPO. Then, a new search algorithm based on the overlay is presented. We compared the new algorithm with popular search algorithms in the unstructured P2P systems. The results show that the algorithm is better than others in MPO according to several parameters. Thus, we draw a conclusion that the combination of the new search algorithm and the MPO has better performances than that of other search algorithm and other overlay.

Open media service architecture for advanced collaboration environments

Advanced collaboration environments are extensively utilized for distance learning, e-science, and other distributed global collaboration events. In such environments, high-quality and seamless media services play an important role in improving the quality of user experience to participants. In this paper, to support high-quality media-based services, we design open media service architecture for advanced collaboration environments, by combining the open interface for state-of-the-art media tools, the performance monitoring tools for devices and networks, and application-level adaptation schemes for media streaming. By implementing the proposed architecture on top of an open-source Access Grid (AG) collaboration toolkit, we verify that high-quality collaboration among several collaboration sites can be effectively realized over a multicast-enabled network testbed with improved media quality experience.

Information-theoretic Approaches Based on Sequential Monte Carlo to Collaborative Distributed Sensors for Mobile Robot Localization

We consider the Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method for Bayesian inference applied to the problem of information-theoretic distributed sensor collaboration in complex environments. The robot kinematics and sensor observation under consideration are described by nonlinear models. The exact solution to this problem is prohibitively complex due to the nonlinear nature of the system. The SMC method is, therefore, employed to track the probabilistic kinematics of the robot and to make the corresponding Bayesian estimates and predictions. To meet the specific requirements inherent in distributed sensors, such as low-communication consumption and collaborative information processing, we propose a novel SMC solution that makes use of the particle filter technique for data fusion, and the density tree representation of the a posterior distribution for information exchange between sensor nodes. Meanwhile, an efficient numerical method is proposed for approximating the information utility in sensor selection. A further experiment, obtained with a real robot in an indoor environment, illustrates that under the SMC framework, the optimal sensor selection and collaboration can be implemented naturally, and significant improvement in localization accuracy is achieved when compared to conventional methods using all sensors.

IQ-Paths: Predictably High Performance Data Streams Across Dynamic Network Overlays

Overlay networks are a key vehicle for delivering network and processing resources to high performance applications. For shared networks, however, to consistently deliver such resources at desired levels of performance, overlays must be managed at runtime, based on the continuous assessment and prediction of available distributed resources. Data-intensive applications, for example, must assess, predict, and judiciously use available network paths, and dynamically choose alternate or exploit concurrent paths. Otherwise, they cannot sustain the consistent levels of performance required by tasks like remote data visualization, online program steering, and remote access to high end devices. The multiplicity of data streams occurring in complex scientific workflows or in large-scale distributed collaborations exacerbate this problem, particularly when different streams have different performance requirements. This paper presents IQ-Paths, a set of techniques and their middleware realization that implement self-regulating overlay streams for data-intensive distributed applications. Self-regulation is based on (1) the dynamic and continuous assessment of the quality of each overlay path, (2) the use of online network monitoring and statistical analyses that provide probabilistic guarantees about available path bandwidth, loss rate, and RTT, and (3) self-management, via an efficient packet routing and scheduling algorithm that dynamically schedules data packets to different overlay paths in accordance with their available bandwidths. IQ-Paths offers probabilistic guarantees for application-level specifications of stream utility, based on statistical predictions of available network bandwidth. This affords applications with the ability, for instance, to send control or steering data across overlay paths that offer strong guarantees for future bandwidth vs. across less guaranteed paths. Experimental results presented in this paper use IQ-Paths to better handle the different kinds of data produced by two high performance applications and one multimedia application: (1) a data-driven interactive high performance code with user-defined utility requirements, (2) an adaptive overlay version of the popular Grid-FTP application, and (3) a MPEG-4 Fine-Grained Scalable layered video streaming.

When timeliness matters: The effect of status on reactions to perceived time delay within distributed collaboration.

This research examines the interactive effects of status and perceived time delay on acceptance of partner knowledge contributions within a distributive collaboration work environment. Results across 2 studies suggest that within distributed collaboration, time delays attributed to low-status partners had a significantly more harmful effect on influence acceptance than time delay attributed to high-status partners. This was so, despite the fact that partners' actual behavior was held constant across experimental conditions. In addition, results indicate that judgments of partner competence significantly mediated the interactive effects of perceived time delay and partner status on acceptance of partner influence.