Groupware Applications Research Articles

The Differential Effect of Privacy-Related Trust on Groupware Application Adoption and Use during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic lockdown lead to the rapid adoption and use of various groupware applications ("apps'') for remote connection with colleagues, friends, and family. Different factors such as user experiences, trust, and social influences ("user-situational motivations'') were instrumental in determining how and what apps people adopted and used, especially at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this empirical study, we examine how these factors and four predominant user-situational motivations (i.e., the mandated use of an app by an employer/institution, recommended use of an app by an employer/institution, recommended use of an app by a peer(s), and self-selection of an app) influenced the rapid adoption and use of groupware applications. Specifically, we develop an "emergency adoption model" of groupware applications using 195 valid survey responses to highlight the factors that motivated these apps' use at the onset of COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. We leverage the Technology Adoption Model (TAM) and integrate it with the users' past use of the application before the COVID-19 lockdown, user-situational motivation, and their privacy-related trust in the application provider to develop a more comprehensive model. Using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM), we find that the users who used a groupware app in the past continued to use it, and in line with TAM, users' intention to adopt and use a groupware application was largely driven by the ease-of-use and usefulness of the app. Furthermore, while not a part of the traditional TAM model, we find that privacy-related trust in the application provider plays an important role in emergency adoption. However, unlike typical adoption models, the nature of all these effects---most prominently those related to privacy-related trust---depend on the underlying situational motivation. We discuss the implications of these findings and suggest ways to improve the adoption and use of groupware applications, especially during crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Blockchain privacy‐preserving smart contract centric multiplemultipartykey agreement over largeWANETs

AbstractWith the rapid increase in the popularity of groupware applications whose security mainly relied on the key being used, which made multi‐party/group secret key agreements significant. However, the brute‐force attacks to interpret the group key made group communication vulnerable. The logical solution to overcome this is changing the group key frequently. In this direction, we propose blockchain‐based multiple shared keys agreement among a group of participants. As with conventional methods, the proposed protocol does not rely on strong random number generation and/or master key. In this technique, the privacy‐preserving smart contract acts as group controller (GC) and forms two parties with each of the other nodes. The GC, while generating these two‐party keys in the first round instead of exchanging one public key, it exchanges “m” public keys with each of the other nodes and generatesm2shared two‐party keys with each of the respective nodes. Now in the second round, GC generatesm2sequential products of two‐party shared keys and stores them securely as private data objects in the privacy‐preserving smart contract. Next GC computesm2sequential public keys to each of the respective nodes by multiplying these products with the inverse of individual members shared keys sequentially of the group nodes in trusted execution environment and shares them with respective group nodes. On receiving respective public keys, each group node computes the multiple multiparty shared keys by multiplying it with their individual shared keys. Furthermore, an upper limit for the number of shared keys obtained in terms of the number of keys exchanged.

Attribute-Based Authenticated Group Key Transfer Protocol without Pairing

Group key establishment protocol is the primary requirement of several group-ware applications, like secure conferences, pay per view, collaborative work space that needs to establish a secure session among a group of participants. However, some of the applications often need to establish a secure session among the participants without knowing their actual identities. In such cases, the legitimacy of participants is decided based up on a descriptive set of attributes usually called as access structure. The participants should have sufficient set of attributes to satisfy the access structure, which are to consider as authenticated and eligible for the group conversation. This paper introducing an attribute based authenticated group key transfer protocol without using bilinear pairing. Group key management based on attributes gives fine-grained access control over the group of members that are authenticated by the set of attributes. The proposed protocol uses, Shamir Secret Sharing and elliptic curve arithmetic instead of bilinear pairing computations. The members are authenticated based on the access structure defined by the session initiator. The group key is securely transferred to only those participants, who are authenticated by their attributes. The authentication process of proposed protocol is information theoretically secure, while the key confidentiality relies on the intractability of Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem.

Is Group-Awareness Context-Awareness?

This article discusses the interest of emerging a unified view for group awareness and context information on groupware and context-aware systems. Group awareness corresponds to an important concept on Groupware applications, allowing individual users to be kept aware of group's activities and status. Context is defined by ubiquitous computing as any relevant information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. We assume that group awareness information should be considered as context information and handled as such. Group awareness information is often employed for decision making, contributing to users' activities and decisions, but it gives also an important clue about user's context, characterizing individual's actions regarding the group. As such, group awareness may be used for adaptation purposes, adapting the system behavior, the supplied content or its services. Besides, architectural concerns adopted on context-aware system should also be considered when developing new groupware applications that are more and more designed as context-aware systems.

Industrial Robots’ Application in Processing Production Line of Mechanical Parts

With the increasing improvement of intellectualization and automation, the advantages of applying the automation in the field of robotics are becoming outstanding. The robot is taking the place of labor, which greatly improves the production efficiency of enterprises. Taking the motor case processing production line as an example, this paper did research on groupware application of industrial robot technology, PLC technology, CC-LINK bus communication technology and CNC machine tool processing technology, designed the robot’s automatic loading and unloading device of the processing system and the automatic grading system for the finished product, which makes the robot and CNC machining become one and gains automatic and unmanned machining process of parts.

Domino

We present Domino, a descriptive framework for hybrid collaboration and hybrid coupling styles in partially distributed teams. Domino enables researchers to describe, analyze, and understand real-world hybrid collaboration practices, i.e., collaborative practices that involve simultaneous co-located and remote collaboration with phases of both synchronous and asynchronous work that spans multiple groupware applications and devices. It also helps to categorize collaborative activities based on yet undocumented hybrid coupling styles between the members of multiple partially distributed or co-located subgroups. Our Domino framework was derived from initial observations of real-world practice and refined by the detailed analysis of participants' behavior and working styles during a simulation of a complex hybrid collaboration task with six partially distributed teams of four users in our lab. The resulting framework allows researchers to view collaboration through a new analytical lens, use new analytical tools, and also derive implications for the design of collaborative tools.

User Interaction Modeling and Profile Extraction in Interactive Systems: A Groupware Application Case Study.

A relevant goal in human–computer interaction is to produce applications that are easy to use and well-adjusted to their users’ needs. To address this problem it is important to know how users interact with the system. This work constitutes a methodological contribution capable of identifying the context of use in which users perform interactions with a groupware application (synchronous or asynchronous) and provides, using machine learning techniques, generative models of how users behave. Additionally, these models are transformed into a text that describes in natural language the main characteristics of the interaction of the users with the system.

Validating Design Patterns for Mobile Groupware Applications by Expert Users: a USAER Case

The objective of this research work was to analyze the pertinence of a set of design patterns for mobile groupware applications. The pertinence of said contribution was supported by 11 participant members of an educational support group (USAER). The perception of expert users is commonly used in Human- Computer Interaction to improve and validate design strategies such as the proposed one. In this case the feedback provided by the participants helped to ensure that the knowledge offered by the set of patterns is adequate and accurate. A distilled feedback would lead to well-designed user interfaces for mobile groupware applications.

Inclusive transformation consistency control algorithm in distributed system

Operational transformation (OT) is the most effective method for consistency and concurrency control in multi-user groupware applications. This study proposes a new string-based OT algorithm to address the challenge of swapping and transposing two deletions. It has removed the faults of previous existing algorithm swapDD (ABTS: a transformation-based consistency control algorithm for wide-area collaborative applications, collaborative computing: networking, applications and worksharing 1–10, 2009). Existing algorithm swapDD fails totally in transposing two deletions if the first operation region is included in the second operation region or the second operation string is covered by the first operation string. In addition, swapDD has not considered partial overlapping between two deletions in swapping and fails at boundary conditions. New proposed algorithm works well in all possible cases of transposing two deletions. It handles overlapping and splitting of operations.

An authenticated group key transfer protocol using elliptic curve cryptography

Several groupware applications like e-conferences, pay-per view, online games, etc. require a common session key to establish a secure communication among the group participants. For secure communication, such applications often need an efficient group key establishment protocol to construct a common session key for group communications. Conventional group key transfer protocols depends on mutually trusted key generation center (KGC) to generate and distribute the group key to each participant in each session. However, those approaches require extra communication overheads in the server setup. This paper presents an efficient and secure group key transfer protocol using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). The proposed protocol demonstrates a novel group key transfer protocol, in which one of the group member plays the role of KGC (the protocol without an online KGC, which is based on elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP) and Shamir’s secret sharing scheme. The confidentiality of the proposed protocol is ensured by Shamir’s secret sharing, i.e., information theoretically secure and provides authentication using ECDLP. Furthermore, the proposed protocol resists against potential attacks (insider and outsider) and also significantly reduces the overheads of the system. The security analysis section of the present work also justifies the security attributes of the proposed protocol under various security assumptions.

Integration of Data from Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks Using Model-Driven Collaborative Tools

Ubiquitous environments such as Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks need applications that allow them to integrate data and services to build knowledge that can be used to make decisions and to improve standards of living and user safety, among others. We have designed a collaborative virtual environment that covers the needs of integration of knowledge from different vehicles to endow the final user with the necessary information. This environment has been carried out following a model-driven approach that generates a groupware application for improving collaborative work and access to services. The implemented tool facilitates the development and implementation of collaborative frameworks in VANETs, where every vehicle acts as a node.

Using Design Patterns as Usability Heuristics for Mobile Groupware Systems

The objective of this research was to determine the capability of design patterns to find usability issues in mobile groupware interfaces. A particular collection of patterns was used for this purpose. Patterns were obtained by identifying essential activities and collaborative tasks in the communication process among members of working groups. A previous study on said proposal suggested that design solutions offered by the patterns foster communication, collaboration, and coordination through user interface elements. This new analysis evaluated virtues of the proposal from a user interface-assessment perspective. For this purpose 6 experts on design, usability, HCI and UCD validated the heuristics, which were then applied by 12 members of an educational support group called USAER. Results suggested that proposed heuristics could provide a reliable perspective of the usability level of mobile user interfaces for groupware applications.

A Pairing Free Anonymous Certificateless Group Key Agreement Protocol for Dynamic Group

Group key agreement protocol is the primary requirement of several groupware applications like secure conferences; pay-per view, etc. which requires secure and authentic conversations among a group...

Case Study of the Remote Assistant System for Supporting Lesson Reflection Using Groupware Application among Inexperienced Teachers

Case Study of the Remote Assistant System for Supporting Lesson Reflection Using Groupware Application among Inexperienced Teachers

Ternary Tree based Group Key Agreement Protocol Over Elliptic Curve for Dynamic Group

group communication is an active area of research and its popularity is fuelled by the growing importance of group oriented internet applications such as voice & video conferences, pay per view, etc. Several groupware applications like video conferences, distributed computations, etc requires secure transmission while communicating over the Internet. For secure communication, the integrity of the messages, member authentication, and confidentiality are must be provided among group members. To provide message integrity all group members must be agreed up on a common group key to encrypt and decrypt the messages. This paper proposes an efficient and contributory group key agreement protocol and also support dynamic operations like join, leave, merge, etc. by using ECC based Diffie Hellman key exchange. This protocol employs ternary tree like structure instead of binary tree in the process of group key generation. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with that of several others existing schemes in literature and it is found that the proposed one is performs well in terms of communication and computation cost. In addition, the formal security validation is done using AVISPA tool that demonstrated that the proposed protocol is safe against passive and active attacks.

Designing a Shared Single Display Education Application through Interactive Patterns

Interactive patterns are able to promote the notion of reusability in groupware application development. Hence, these patterns support the comprehensiveness of both the interaction design and implementation while easing code modification for groupware application. Groupware is used to describe a broad range of technologies that support person-to-person collaboration. How to design and develop a groupware in an effective manner remains a research question worth exploring. This paper introduces a reusable method, patterns, to develop a single shared display application. Nine different interactive patterns that allow participants to interact collaboratively or non-collaboratively in a single shared display application are introduced in this paper. This is followed by the presentation of our quantitative results on the usability of the interactive patterns and the reusability of the patterns in designing and maintaining a single shared display application. From the results, not only are the patterns useful and easy to understand, the patterns actually ease the process of designing and maintenance during the application development under a single shared display.

Collaborative and social development environments: a literature review

Software developers spend a majority of their time using a development environment coupled with a variety of collaborative tools. They use integrated development environments IDEs in different editing and debugging activities while solving particular technical problems or developing different pieces of software. These programming environments evolved from command line tools, to text-based IDEs, graphical IDEs, and eventually to collaborative and social development environments SDEs. This paper reviews the current state of the art in collaborative development environments CDEs and surveys the evolution in this area. The importance of collaboration within software engineering is addressed, followed by detailed information about collaborative systems for software development. Groupware architectures, taxonomies, and groupware applications relevant to software development are discussed, and various research systems that fall within these classifications are described. The paper concludes with recent research related to collaborative and social software engineering.

Heuristic Evaluation for Mobile Groupware: Evaluating Two Audience Response Systems

In conferences, congresses and symposia, there are issues that may be handled by applications running in mobile devices. In these environments, Audience Response Systems can be used to increase iteration between participants. This paper aims to evaluate the usability of two Audience Response Systems, namely Simple Question and Voting, developed for collaborative proposals. We employed a set of 15 heuristics for mobile groupware evaluation, which includes three fundamental aspects of mobile groupware applications: HCI, mobilit y, and collabo ration. In the evaluation performed in this work, three specialists used the heuristics to evaluate both systems interfaces. The evaluation was conducted in three steps: (i) exploration of the system and its features; (ii) usability evaluation; (iii) consolidation of the collected data and reflection. The evaluation results of Simple Question and Voting indicated than both are in accordance with some usability aspects. However, we also identified common problems, such as non-appropriate communication methods, low coordination, and group management. Based on the results and experiences obtained over this evaluation, we argue that the heuristic set presented is applicable to evaluate mobile groupware usability. Keywords: heuristic evaluation, mobile groupware, usability.

F2FMI: A toolkit for facilitating face-to-face mobile interaction

The importance of mobile groupware systems resides in the specific tasks that they can perform and other systems cannot. On the one hand, groupware systems allow groups of users to work together providing facilities that single-user systems are unable to offer. On the other hand, unlike stationary systems, mobile systems allow users to work on the move. The intersection of these two technologies offers a new support for activities, such as spontaneous collaboration, that could be facilitated neither by stationary groupware systems nor by mobile single-user systems. However, implementations of this new support are uncommon, probably because of the high development effort required and the seemingly little benefit obtained. In this paper, we aim to reduce this effort by facilitating the development of mobile groupware applications that support such activities. Our proposal to achieve this objective involves the design and implementation of the Face-to-Face Mobile Interaction (F2FMI) toolkit, whose goal is to provide generic and reusable software components required in most cases. We expect this strategy to yield a higher variety of successfully deployed applications, which in turn will demonstrate the benefits of supporting this kind of interactions through mobile devices.

Determining and locating the closest available resources to mobile collaborators

Nowadays, organizations include a large number of physical resources (e.g., meeting rooms, classrooms, and auditoriums) and computing ones (e.g., scanners, plotters, and handheld devices) distributed among different offices and buildings. Typically, these resources have to be shared among colleagues, because it is impossible for each collaborator to own private instances of all the different resources present in the organization. In this way, resource sharing gives collaborators the opportunity of not just lending their resources to other collaborators but also benefitting from the usage of resources they do not own. However, finding shared resources in a huge organization, without a proper technological support, can be a challenge for a member of staff and obviously really hard or even impossible for an external person. The main contribution of this paper is a service-oriented architecture called Resource Availability Management Services (RAMS), which is intended to facilitate the development of groupware applications that manage the availability and suitability of human, physical and computing resources. In the case of physical resources, the RAMS architecture allows determining the available resources closest to the requesting collaborator that satisfy his/her requirements and provides information about their physical location and the shortest path to reach them. To accomplish these goals, the proposed architecture relies on the services provided by three main components: (1) a Human Face Recognizer that allows identifying and locating collaborators in an organization, (2) an Ontology-based Matchmaker, which is able to determine a set of available and accessible resources that can satisfy a collaborator’s request, and (3) a Physical Resource Locator that relies on building topologies and the walking distance method to calculate high precision relative distances between collaborators and resources.