Technology-Mediated Collaboration

Researchers

• Mark S. Ackerman  Professor
• Thomas Finholt  Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Innovation
• Joseph Hardin  Clinical Assistant Professor
• John L. King  William Warner Bishop Collegiate Professor of Information
  Vice Provost for Academic Information
• Gary M. Olson  Professor Emeritus
• Judith S. Olson  Professor Emerita
• Stephanie Teasley  Research Associate Professor and Director of the Doctoral Program
• Terry E. Weymouth  Associate Research Scientist
• Ann S. Zimmerman  Research Assistant Professor

Current Projects

Past Projects

Center for Information Technology Integration (CITI) The Center for Information Technology Integration engages in advanced development and research projects, in partnership with external sponsors, that will enhance the University of Michigan's information technology environment; and transfers the results to industry, government, and education. Since 1986, CITI has studied and developed information technologies that enhance the campus computing infrastructure. Contact: Thomas Finholt (finholt@umich.edu)

Collaborative Augmentation of Knowledge Production Researchers study the cyclic processes by which the intellectual efforts of many people lead to the valuable accumulations of new knowledge. One familiar example is the "Document Lifecycle": people write books which go into libraries and are found and read by other people, some of whom write more books, etc. Another would be recommender systems where people see movies, give ratings to a software system that combines them with other peoples' ratings to make recommendations for other movies, which people see and rate, etc. The ultimate goal of this research is to devise ways to use information technology to create new social knowledge enhancement-cycles and to better support existing ones. Contact: George Furnas (furnas@umich.edu)

Collaborative Filtering Project This was some of the earliest published works on what is now known widely as collaborative filtering, used, for example, by Amazon.com to make recommendations. Together with Will Hill, Mark Rosenstein, and Larry Stead, the research team focused on electronic streamlined support for allowing a virtual community of users to help each other find things they want. Their test case was a recommender system that was startlingly effective in helping people find videos they would like, based on finding people with similar tastes and combining their opinions in a customized way. Contact: George Furnas (furnas@umich.edu)

Collaborative Research: Field Studies of Organizational Memory and Information Reuse Organizations know the information they have is valuable and that its use and reuse is necessary to their continuing success, yet surprisingly little is known about the details of such reuse. It is clear that organizations waste an enormous amount of their information and knowledge. This research aims to codify some of the detailed, systematic insights necessary to understand how to effectively reuse information. Data, analyses, and insights about these issues can create immediate practical improvements in information reuse and information processes within organizations. It can also advance a more complete theory of organizational memory, as well as provide the social and organizational insights necessary to construct computer-supported cooperative work systems. Contact: Mark Ackerman (ackerm@umich.edu)

Collaboratory on Technology Enhanced Learning Communities (CoTelCo) The project provided an interactive collaboratory environment in which its U.S. and South Africa participants could explore geographically distributed collaborative learning and complex, cross-national virtual teams. The project was supported by the Alliance for Community Technology and the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work at the School of Information; Microsoft Research; and UNESCO, the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Contact: Derrick Cogburn (dcogburn@umich.edu)

Communications Core for the Great Lakes Regional Center of Excellence in Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases (GLRCE) Researchers support the overarching structure of the GLRCE in ways that promote and facilitate scientific collaboration, enhance access to cutting-edge resources needed for the research, and encourage the ready exchange of information and ideas to enhance the pace of research. The work has provided the communication tools necessary to support this activity and researchers are monitoring the use of the tools, providing support and training in the use of the tools, and facilitating exchanges within and between sites. The technology provided by the core consists of easily accessible tools that enable communication within and between projects, and supports communication between the GLRCE participants and the administrative core. Specifically, researchers have employed collaboration technology, called CTools, developed at the University of Michigan (see also Sakai's public Web site). Through the Communications Core, GLRCE members are encouraged to work together with the same ease and flexibility as if they were in the same institution. Past projects on the same theme are also online. Contact: Stephanie Teasley (steasley@umich.edu)

Globalization of Work This is a series of projects organized through the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work and funded by corporate sponsors. Researchers perform longitudinal studies on distributed teams in several global corporations as they carry out collaborative, often distributed projects. Participants include Ford, Lucent, Steelcase, and IBM. Contact: Tom Finholt (finholt@umich.edu)

Great Lakes Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) The Great Lakes CFAR was one of 17 nationally and the first to join multiple AIDS researchers and their institutions through a collaboratory. Researchers from the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Minnesota shared their knowledge through the collaboratory. The Great Lakes CFAR was funded by the National Institutes of Health. Contact: Stephanie Teasley (steasley@umich.edu)

International Cancer and AIDS Research and Education Network (ICARE Net) Cancer and AIDS researchers in this collaboratory sought to speed up clinical trials. Researchers worked to better understand how the cancer and HIV/AIDS research communities work, formulate a technology development and deployment plan, and establish a baseline against which to understand the changes in practice that may result from the use of new technologies. Contact: Tom Finholt (finholt@umich.edu)

Learning Collaboratory The Learning Collaboratory provided evaluative information on and testbed versions of collaborative technologies for use by education and small businesses. The project was funded by SBC Communications and was conducted in partnership with units at all three U-M campuses. Contact: Joseph Hardin (hardin@umich.edu)

Medical Collaboratory (MedCollab) The National Science Foundation-funded Medical Collaboratory engaged primary health-care physicians and health-care specialists from the University of Michigan Medical Center in exploring and testing a tool kit for viewing images and video at a distance. Using user-centered methods, MedCollab researchers developed these tools to allow radiologists to carry out distributed consultations. Contact: Terry Weymouth (weymouth@umich.edu)

Michigan Grid Research and Infrastructure Development (MGRID) The MGRID initiative's goal is to develop a grid and cyberinfrastructure prototype at the U-M and enable U-M researchers to solve scientific and engineering problems that are orders of magnitude more complex than what is possible using current infrastructure. "Grid Computing" brings together computing resources, databases, networks, scientific instruments, and digital libraries to give participating researchers a unified and transparent view of all resources. Contact: Tom Finholt (finholt@umich.edu)

Multiscale Collaborative Virtual Environments Picture people at the scale of virtual ants and virtual giants working together in large virtual worlds. Researchers want to to add multiscale capabilities to collaborative virtual environments that can help people work in very large electronic worlds and introduce interesting interface and social challenges. Contact: George Furnas (furnas@umich.edu)

Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation: A Distributed Virtual Laboratory (NEESGrid) The project involves creating a collaboratory for the community of earthquake engineering researchers who will use the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), which links researchers and facilities at approximately 25 universities with high-performance networking, shared databases, computer modeling and simulation tools, and telepresence capabilities that could transform earthquake engineering. NEESGrid researchers assess the nature of research conducted within the various areas of earthquake engineering, examine existing and potential collaborative work across sites, and determine the collaborative needs of NEES award sites and users. Contact: Thomas Finholt (finholt@umich.edu)

NFSv4 for Cluster File Systems This grant extends a joint project between IBM Almaden Research Center (ARC) and the University of Michigan Center for Information Technology Integration (CITI). The goals of this project are to enhance the Linux NFSv4 client and server to operate correctly with a cluster file system, and to exploit emerging NFSv4 features to improve performance, fault-tolerance, and load balancing. The primary deliverable of this project is open source software, released through appropriate Linux maintainers. While IBM's file system of choice is GPFS, the project strategy is to define generic interfaces that are broadly accepted by the open source community. Contact: Peter Honeyman (honey@umich.edu)

Preparing the LTER Network for Collaborative Science, Education, and Synthesis For more than 20 years, the LTER Network has addressed a set of initiatives in response to environmental challenges. This planning project is intended to develop a plan for LTER network-level science, technology, and training; explore alternative governance, planning, and evaluation structures for managing LTER Network science; and envision and plan for education, training, outreach, and knowledge exchange activities to link LTER science with application needs. This planning activity created the framework necessary for the LTER Network to increase the scale and scope of activity needed to address a number of ecological research challenges, achieve a higher level of coordination and complementarity among the research sites, incorporate new, enabling technologies into LTER research, broadly train the next generation of ecologists, and improve and increase the exchange of knowledge among scientists, managers, and policy makers. Contact: Ann Zimmerman (asz@umich.edu)

Pritzker Evaluation and Assessment of a Brain Science Collaboratory The Pritzker Foundation funded this research to support a distributed group of multidisciplinary researchers at the University of Michigan, Cornell University, and Stanford University who studied causes of and cures for psychological depression. SI researchers evaluated scientific and collaborative practices among the collaboratory participants, evaluated the selection of collaboration tools that fit existing and anticipated practices, and conducted an assessment of the impact of the collaboration tools in use. Contact: Tom Finholt (finholt@umich.edu)

Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure: Report of NSF Blue Ribbon Advisory Panel (Atkins Report) Contact: Daniel Atkins (atkins@umich.edu)

Sakai This community-source software development effort aims to design, build, and deploy a new Collaboration and Learning Environment for higher education. The project began in January 2004 and is a collaboration among the University of Michigan, Indiana University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University. The Open Knowledge Initiative and the uPortal consortium also play major roles. The project's primary goal is to deliver the Sakai application framework and associated content management tools and components that are designed to work together. These components are for course management, and, as an augmentation of the original content management model, they also support research collaboration. The software is designed to be competitive with the best content management software available and is being built by designers, software architects, and developers at different institutions, using an experimental variation of an open-source development model called the community source model. Contact: Joseph Hardin (hardin@umich.edu)

Science of Collaboratories In the past several decades, there have been a series of attempts to build collaboration infrastructures to support geographically distributed science and engineering teams (e.g., the Space Physics and Aeronomy Research Collaboratory, or SPARC). Only some of these projects have been successful, and all of them have been one-off, ad hoc efforts. The NSF-funded Science of Collaboratories project seeks to understand the social and technical conditions required for success and to codify these in principles and design guidelines for future such efforts. Contact: Gary Olson (gmo@umich.edu)

Seeing is Believing: The Value of Video for Remote Work Two questions that concern video links between work team members at separate locations are under what conditions/tasks is the addition of video over audio truly beneficial, and what effect do various conditions of video degradation have on user performance? The research focuses on the effect of the presence or absence of video on tasks deemed key to long-term teams, involving the establishment and maintenance of trust and the detection of deception. Contact: Judy Olson (jsolson@umich.edu)

Space Physics and Aeronomy Research Collaboratory (SPARC) When it began, was one of the Internet's premier collaborative research efforts. Space physics researchers around the world controlled and gathered data from more than a dozen instruments across -- and above -- the globe. Along with this smorgasbord of live data came direct access to the most advanced supercomputer models of upper-atmospheric phenomena, and a set of state-of-the-art communication tools, including "chat rooms" and a shared white-board utility. The National Science Foundation funded SPARC and its forerunner, the Upper Atmospheric Research Collaboratory. Contact: Thomas Finholt (finholt@umich.edu)

Web 2.0 Community Data Mining and Expertise (QuME) Expertise finders are an important class of collaborative recommendation systems, but they suffer from a general problem: Current expertise finders, both commercial and research, cannot infer expertise levels very well. Traditionally, expertise finders have relied on the standard information similarity measures (such as term vector comparisons). The ability to add the level of expertise would be a major step forward for expertise finders, and would likely open up a range of new application possibilities. This work proposes to solve this problem by constructing a prototype middleware system, called QuME, which contains a number of mechanisms to facilitate expertise finding, expertise exchange, and social interaction for online communities and organizations. QuME includes novel mechanisms to infer expertise levels, making a larger range of social interaction possible. Contact: Mark Ackerman (ackerm@umich.edu)