Remote Partners Research Articles

A highly-accurate and low-overhead prediction model for transfer throughput optimization

An important bottleneck for data-intensive scalable computing systems is efficient utilization of the network links that connect the collaborating institutions with their remote partners, data sour...

Providing conversation partners views of the driving scene mitigates cell phone-related distraction

Cognitively demanding cell phone conversations impair driving performance. In some situations, conversations with a passenger are less disruptive than cell phone conversations, in theory because of heightened situational awareness. Here, drivers completed challenging freeway drives in a high-fidelity simulator while conversing with a partner. The pairs engaged in naturalistic conversations in three different conditions: remotely on a hands-free phone, as a passenger in the vehicle, and in a videophone condition where the hands-free phone experience was enhanced by a live video the driving scene and the driver’s face. This condition was designed to increase the conversation partner’s awareness of the driving situation to a level similar to that of an in-vehicle passenger, to test our hypothesis that this cognizance leads to less distracted driving. We compared these conversation conditions to a driving-alone condition. Drivers were involved in more collisions with merging vehicles in the phone condition compared to drive-alone, passenger or videophone conditions, and crucially there was no difference in collisions between the passenger and videophone conditions. Providing remote conversation partner information about the driver and driving scene reduces the detrimental effect of cell phone conversations, possibly by increasing shared situational awareness.

Exploring Communication in Remote Teams

Teamwork in many operational settings, such as air traffic control or telemedicine, involves members who are at different locations and, as in space exploration missions, may communicate under time-delayed conditions. Collaboration and coordination in distributed teams differ from face-to-face interactions in a number of important respects (Brennan & Lockridge, 2006). Remote communication eliminates visual cues and thus requires more effort to establish common ground. Unlike co-present partners, distributed team members cannot rely on gestures and facial expressions to direct the other’s attention and provide feedback on their understanding. Voice communication between remote partners maintains the meaning nuances of face-to-face interactions that is lacking in text-based conversations. On the other hand, writing enables partners to re-read and thus to remember past communications, and to review and revise their messages prior to sharing them with others. These resources are not available in spoken discourse where participants have to rely on their memory or external aids (e.g., note pads) to keep track of the flow of the conversation and to compose their contributions. Transmission delays between partners’ contributions further complicate grounding (Olson, G., & Olson, J., 2000). The timing of turns is challenging, and individual contributions may be out of sequence, making it difficult for team members to follow the thread of a conversation and thus to develop shared situation models. Moreover, distributed teams frequently consist of individuals with different expertise and different goals, differences that may hamper mutual understanding and collaboration (Bearman, Paletz, Orasanu, & Thomas, 2010). This panel brings together researchers who have examined team communication in a variety of domains: healthcare (Morrow), aviation (Mosier), Navy (Miller), disaster response (Veinott), and space missions (Fischer, Miller). Panelists will be asked to characterize the constraints faced by conversational partners in these domains, to present analytic tools for studying remote communication and to discuss procedural or technological solutions to facilitate collaboration and coordination in distributed teams.

A shared minimum-error discrimination among three linearly dependent mirror-symmetric qubit states

We discuss how a shared minimum-error discrimination (SMD) may be implemented by two remote partners Alice and Bob. Here Bob is given a qubit prepared in one of three linearly dependent mirror-symmetric states with a priori probability. Alice has the knowledge of Bob's signal states, but Bob has not. We show that the shared generalized measurement could be realized by Alice performing a suitable unitary evolution from acting on her system to acting on Bob's system, and remotely rotating the optimal measurement directions to coincide with Bob's basis vectors. In this case, Bob could perform a local orthogonal measurement to determine his signal states with the smallest possible error and without inconclusive answers. A quantum network, which is realizable with current technology, is suggested to implement this SMD.

“Made in” versus “Shipped from”: Country-of-Delivery-Origin Effects and the Role of Perceived Risk

While Internet retailers strive to post the optimal combination of communicative signals, Internet consumers struggle to attend to and interpret the ever-growing spectrum of cues. Consumers now utilize an additional source of extrinsic information: country of delivery origin (CDO). CDO relates the country from which goods are shipped (i.e., the place a remote trade partner designates or keeps inventory). This study explores the importance of the construct in information processing. An experiment investigates the extent to which CDO affects consumers’ perceived risks and product attitudes. Based on the findings, academic and managerial implications are provided along with limitations and future research directions.

Essential Telemedicine Elements (Tele-Ments) for Connecting the Academic Health Center and Remote Community Providers to Enhance Patient Care

The authors draw on their experience with the University of California, San Diego Medical Center's successful enterprise-level clinical telemedicine program to present a paradigm for other academic health centers (AHCs) that wish to develop such a program. They detail key telemedicine program elements, or "tele-ments," that they consider essential to the development of a centralized, structured telemedicine program and relevant to the development of smaller programs. These tele-ments include an overall organizational vision, a centralized telemedicine infrastructure, telemedicine-specific policies and procedures, medical record documentation, relationships between the AHC clinical hub and its remote (spoke) partners, identification of and training for specialty providers, a business plan based on service agreements and/or insurance billing, and licensure/privileging. They discuss the importance of delaying equipment purchases until a plan is in place for sustaining the telemedicine enterprise and of establishing measures to define success at the outset of program development. In addition, they detail the benefits and concerns associated with telemedicine, provide a comprehensive listing of the roles and responsibilities of providers and staff involved in all aspects of telemedicine, and share samples of their program's informed consent forms and workflow checklists. Their goal is to offer support and guidance to other AHCs entering the telemedicine arena, enabling them to replicate key elements of a successful, enterprise-wide telemedicine infrastructure.

Patterns of innovating networking in small firms

PurposeSmall firms rely on a variety of network partners, and in various roles, to initiate and implement innovations. While past typologies of innovation networking were defined at the level of firms or industries, the purpose of this paper is to develop a typology at the level of innovation objects.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on survey data of 594 innovations in Dutch small firms, cluster analysis is applied to develop a typology of networking patterns for innovation in small firms.FindingsIn total, six patterns of innovation networking were identified: supplier‐based, customer‐based, informal‐based, bank/accountant‐based, science‐based and government‐based. The supplier‐based pattern is most dominant and characterized by modest and simple contributions from networking partners, while governments tend to be involved in innovations marked by voluminous and complex partner involvement. Validity of the typology is suggested by two findings: more voluminous and complex networking patterns are correlated with firms’ internal capabilities, and with the newness and competence requirements of innovations.Originality/valueFor practitioners the typology provides a more fine‐grained view on how innovations in small firms are developed. This includes the role of relatives and friends, bank and accountants, and remote partners such as governments – network partners which so far were not covered in typologies of innovation networking.

Conventional Wisdom: Negotiating Conventions of Reference Enhances Category Learning

Collaborators generally coordinate their activities through communication, during which they readily negotiate a shared lexicon for activity-related objects. This social-pragmatic activity both recruits and affects cognitive and social-cognitive processes ranging from selective attention to perspective taking. We ask whether negotiating reference also facilitates category learning or might private verbalization yield comparable facilitation? Participants in three referential conditions learned to classify imaginary creatures according to combinations of functional features-nutritive and destructive-that implicitly defined four categories. Remote partners communicated in the Dialogue condition. In the Monologue condition, participants recorded audio descriptions for their own later use. Controls worked silently. Dialogue yielded better category learning, with wider distribution of attention. Monologue offered no benefits over working silently. We conclude that negotiating reference compels collaborators to find communicable structure in their shared activity; this social-pragmatic constraint accelerates category learning and likely provides much of the benefit recently ascribed to learning labeled categories.

Fast and robust image segmentation by small-world neural oscillator networks.

Inspired by the temporal correlation theory of brain functions, researchers have presented a number of neural oscillator networks to implement visual scene segmentation problems. Recently, it is shown that many biological neural networks are typical small-world networks. In this paper, we propose and investigate two small-world models derived from the well-known LEGION (locally excitatory and globally inhibitory oscillator network) model. To form a small-world network, we add a proper proportion of unidirectional shortcuts (random long-range connections) to the original LEGION model. With local connections and shortcuts, the neural oscillators can not only communicate with neighbors but also exchange phase information with remote partners. Model 1 introduces excitatory shortcuts to enhance the synchronization within an oscillator group representing the same object. Model 2 goes further to replace the global inhibitor with a sparse set of inhibitory shortcuts. Simulation results indicate that the proposed small-world models could achieve synchronization faster than the original LEGION model and are more likely to bind disconnected image regions belonging together. In addition, we argue that these two models are more biologically plausible.

An interactive whiteboard for immersive telecollaboration

In this paper, we present CollaBoard, a collaboration system that gives a higher feeling of presence to the local auditory and to the persons on the remote site. By overlaying the remote life-sized video image atop the shared artifacts on the common whiteboard and by keeping the whiteboard’s content editable at both sites, it creates a higher involvement of the remote partners into a collaborative teamwork. All deictic gestures of the remote user are shown in the right context with the shared artifacts on the common whiteboard and thus preserve their meaning. The paper describes the hardware setup, as well as the software implementation and the performed user studies with two identical interconnected systems.

A Study of Gestures in a Video-Mediated Collaborative Assembly Task

This paper presents the results of an experimental investigation of two gesture representations (overlaying hands and cursor pointer) in a video-mediated scenario—remote collaboration on physical task. Our study assessed the relative value of the two gesture representations with respect to their effectiveness in task performance, user's satisfaction, and user's perceived quality of collaboration in terms of the coordination and interaction with the remote partner. Our results show no clear difference between these two gesture representations in the effectiveness and user satisfaction. However, when considering the perceived quality of collaboration, the overlaying hands condition was statistically significantly higher than the pointer cursor condition. Our results seem to suggest that the value of a more expressive gesture representation is not so much a gain in performance but rather a gain in user's experience, more specifically in user's perceived quality of collaborative effort.

Online Diarization of Streaming Audio-Visual Data for Smart Environments

For an environment to be perceived as being smart, contextual information has to be gathered to adapt the system's behavior and its interface towards the user. Being a rich source of context information speech can be acquired unobtrusively by microphone arrays and then processed to extract information about the user and his environment. In this paper, a system for joint temporal segmentation, speaker localization, and identification is presented, which is supported by face identification from video data obtained from a steerable camera. Special attention is paid to latency aspects and online processing capabilities, as they are important for the application under investigation, namely ambient communication. It describes the vision of terminal-less, session-less and multi-modal telecommunication with remote partners, where the user can move freely within his home while the communication follows him. The speaker diarization serves as a context source, which has been integrated in a service-oriented middleware architecture and provided to the application to select the most appropriate I/O device and to steer the camera towards the speaker during ambient communication.

The Complex Interaction Between Global Production Networks, Digital Information Systems and International Knowledge Transfers

Traditionally many studies of knowledge in economics have focused on localized networks and intra-regional collaborations. However, the rising frequency by which firms collaborate within the context of global networks of production and innovation, the increasingly intricate divisions of labor involved and the extensive use of the Internet to facilitate interaction are all relatively novel trends that underline the importance of knowledge creation and flows across different locations. Focusing on this topic, the present chapter examines the complex interactions between global production networks (GPN), digital information systems (DIS) and knowledge transfers in information technology industries. It seeks to disentangle the various conduits through which different kinds of knowledge are transferred within such networks, and investigate how recent generations of DIS are affecting those knowledge transfers. The paper concludes that the dual expansion of GPN and DIS is adding new complexity to the practice of innovation: To access knowledge necessary for sustained creativity firms often have to link up with remote partners in GPN, but to be able to absorb and utilize this knowledge, they also frequently have to engage in local interactive learning processes. These local- global linkages - and the various skills necessary to operate them - are strongly interdependent, mutually reinforcing and critical for the development and maintenance of innovation-based competitiveness.

Distributing attention across multiple social worlds

Being a member of both local and global teams requires constant distribution and re-distribution of attention, engagement, and intensive communication over synchronous and asynchronous channels with remote and local partners. We explore in this paper the increasing number of social worlds such participants distribute their attention to, how this affects their level of engagement and attention, and how the workspace, collaboration technologies, and interaction modes afford and constrain the communicative events. The use of information and collaboration technologies (ICT) shapes and reshapes work spaces, processes, and social interactions among team members, and team members reshape ICT and the way it is used. We use as a testbed the AEC Global Teamwork course established at Stanford in 1993 in collaboration with universities worldwide and provide examples from two sites—Stanford PBL Lab, California USA and Chalmers University, Goteborg Sweden. We used temporal analysis and qualitative methods of inquiry in order to study participants’ attention, how they used the site and the means, i.e., their social and material resources, to accomplish their interaction needs, and how they engaged throughout project reviews.

CULTURAL DIVERSITY AS AN ENGINE FOR KNOWLEDGE DEVELOPMENT

This article first attempts to supply a definition of peoples' identity as scientific as possible and takes a close look at the conditions that make creativity possible. The study of science history clearly indicates that the periods of great creativity were those when communication was sufficient to make remote partners stimulate one another but not to the point where exchanges would be easy enough to level their differences and oppose their diversity. Globalization and the strong will of the people who promote it to make the world uniform stifle cultural diversity and create conditions for a regression. Technoscience, which is wrongly considered as Science, is in the process of stifling true science, which aims to develop our understanding of nature. In a world of instant communications that naturally tend to lower differences, it is essential for us to reinforce identities and cultures if we want to stay original, to keep contributing to knowledge development, and working toward universality.

The roles of sensory modalities in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs)

This study was conducted to assess the effects of sensorial modalities on user performance, perception, and behavior in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). Participants played a CVE game, air hockey, together with a remote partner under different sensory modality conditions, depending on the type of sensory feedback provided: visual-only ( V), visual–haptic ( V + H), and visual–haptic–audio feedback ( V + H + A). Three types of measurements were used as dependent variables: (1) task performance measured as playing time, (2) user perception including the sense of presence, the sense of togetherness, and perceived collaboration, and (3) behavior measurement including the amount of force applied and the mallet deviation. Results of the study indicated that the task performance, perception, and user behavior in CVEs can be affected due to supported sensory modalities. Therefore, the multiple sensory information types that are required to perform the task at hand should be provided to effectively support collaboration between people in CVEs. The outcomes of this research should have a broad impact on multimodal user interaction, including research on physiological, psychophysical, and psychological mechanisms underlying human perception on multisensory feedback in CVEs.

A Scalable and Portable Structure or Conducting Successful Year-long Undergraduate Software Team Projects

Introduction Producing industry ready graduates who are able to perform successfully in the workplace is a very important goal for tertiary educators. Factors of importance to employers, as described by Nunan (1999), extend beyond technical capabilities and include flexibility, independent learning, highly developed communication skills, and the ability to work in teams. This is underlined by industry accreditation requiring teamwork opportunities be provided during the undergraduate experience. Organising teamwork so that it is fairly structured and assessed is not an insignificant challenge (Clarke, 2002, 2005), as students should be sufficiently engaged to ensure that participation is equitable between team members. Engagement is an important issue more broadly. Engaged students become more deeply involved in their own learning, and the current generation of students are very strategic with their choices for engagement (Krause, 2006). Students are highly motivated when faced with authentic tasks in a realistic setting (Krause, 2006). Year-long team projects with external clients provide a well recognized opportunity for students to gain industry experience, whilst being supported and guided by staff to minimize risks. Each group needs to be supervised to ensure that they have enough direction and confidence to approach a new problem of significant size, without being daunted. A structure is needed that is flexible and adaptable to suit various institutional cultures but, at the same time, provides the safety net to ensure that success is highly likely. This paper proposes a structure that is scalable to any class size and portable across institutions and potentially across technical disciplines. The structure leads to team student projects that are successfully engaging and provide excellent experience toward producing work-ready graduates. The structure has been successfully implemented in at least three different universities in Australia and several remote partner sites in different countries over many years. This paper describes and reports on the positive aspects of capstone project units at three different institutions. The work presented is valuable as a presentation of our considered experience and observations of how to manage projects in a flexible framework that we recommend to others teaching similar units. This paper is a comprehensive review of distilled wisdom--based on literature and our own experience. The paper is organised as follows. We initially provide some background regarding our approach and argue that it is based on current best practice. We articulate key success factors for student software team projects, concentrating on those related to student support. We outline the structure in terms of the scaffolding it provides for problem based team learning with a constructivist approach. We then show that it is flexible and can be implemented in different settings by providing case study examples and short descriptions of its successful implementation at various institutions. We conclude this section with some comments on terminology. A project can occur within a Software Engineering degree, IT degree, or Computer Science degree. The different degree context can give subtly different scope for a project, and student background and expectation can differ. The project is often described as a capstone experience. People differ between whether the project is done by a team or a group. Discussing the trade-offs in terminology is beyond the scope of the paper. What we have in mind is a year-long software development project for an external client by a team of at least four later-year students, where students have to proceed from requirements elicitation through to delivery of a product to the client. Background Software team projects are recognized by professional societies, computing practitioners, and educationalists as a core component of effective undergraduate computing degrees (Fincher & Petre, 1998). …

Estimating Interruptibility in the Home for Remote Communication Based on Audio-Visual Tracking

This paper presents a method for automatically estimating human interruptibility in the home environment. To make online remote communication smoother, determining if it is appropriate to interrupt the remote partner is critical. As a first step in achieving this goal, several audio-visual features, extracted from data streams captured by a camera and a microphone, are correlated to human assessments of own interruptibility. Based on these features, the level of interruptibility is estimated using the trained Support Vector Regression (SVR) technique. Finally, we discuss the potential of our method based on the results of several experiments.

Expression of Existence Supporting Sharing Interspatial Distance-“Maai”: Development of Roving Object Integrating Partner’s Shadow and Video Image

In conventional telecommunications, it is difficult to support sharing of interspatial distance (“maai” in Japanese) because conventional information technology (IT) exchanges explicit information, separated from an individual’s embodiment and unable to express the individual’s existence. To solve this problem, we propose sending a remote partner’s shadow and developed the Waseda Shadow Communication System (WSCS). Experiments using WSCS showed that mutual embodiment is extended by interaction through mutual shadows and there is possibility that co-existing space is created between the participants in remote places. We studied the expression of existence supports sharing of interspatial distance-“maai” considering that a shadow extends one’s embodiment, and propose combining a shadow, a video image, and substance. We constructed the system and made the prototype object. This would be effective as a tool telling the meaning of bodily expression with a video image etc. from the primary experiments by the developed system and the object made as an experiment.

Sharing experiences through awareness systems in the home

In the current paper we hypothesize that providing peripheral awareness information to remotely located but socially close individuals will yield affective user benefits. An experiment in a controlled home-like environment was conducted to investigate the effects of providing different levels of peripheral awareness information on these affective benefits. In the experiment peripheral awareness aimed to support groups of friends to jointly watch a soccer match at remote locations. The experiment has shown that providing awareness information increases the social presence and the group attraction felt by individuals towards their remote partners. The experiment has provided concrete quantitative and qualitative evidence for the hypothesized benefits of supporting primary relationships through awareness systems and of the relevance of social presence as a requirement in the design of peripheral awareness displays.