Tutorials

The 2012 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems

(CTS 2012)

May 21-25, 2012

The Westin Westminster Hotel

Denver, Colorado, USA

CTS 2012 Tutorials

T1: Trust Networks (2.5 hrs)

Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis - Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing, Wright State University, Ohio, USA

T2: Collaborative Document Management and Knowledge Work (2.5 hrs)

Steinar Kristoffersen

Østfold University College & Møreforskning AS Molde, Halden, Norway

T3: Models of Coordination in Multiagent Decision Making (3.0 hrs)

Christopher Amato

Computer Science & Artificial intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), MIT, MA, USA

T4: Socialization of Newcomers in Online Communities (3.0 hrs)

Rosta Farzan

Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, PA, USA

T5: Security of Cloud Computing, Storage, and Networking (4.0 hrs)

Mohamed Hamdi

School of Communication Engineering, Tunisia

T6: P2P Networks: File Sharing to Collaborative Computing and Data Fusion (4.0 hrs)

Anura Jayasumana

Colorado State University - Fort Collins, CO, USA

T7: Introduction to Complexity in Collaborative Environments (2.5 hrs)

SK Semwal, George Mudrak, Mike Bolei

University of Colorado - Colorado Springs, CO, USA

T1: Trust Networks (2.5 hrs)

Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis - Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing, Wright State University, Ohio, USA

BRIEF TUTORIAL DESCRIPTION

Trust relationships occur naturally in many diverse contexts such as collaborative systems, e-commerce, interpersonal interactions, social networks, semantic sensor web, etc. As collaborating agents providing content and services become increasingly removed from the agents that consume them, the issue of robust trust inference and update become critical. There is a need to find online substitutes for traditional (direct or face-to-face) cues to derive measures of trust, and create efficient and secure system for managing trust, to support decision-making. Unfortunately, there is neither a universal notion of trust that is applicable to all domains nor a clear explication of its semantics or computation in many situations. In this survey, we motivate the trust problem, explain the relevant concepts, summarize research in modeling trust and approaches to gleaning trustworthiness, and discuss challenges confronting us. The goal is to provide a comprehensive broad overview of the trust landscape, with the nitty-gritties of a handful of approaches. We also provide details of the theoretical underpinnings and comparative analysis of Bayesian approaches to binary and multi-level trust, to automatically determine trustworthiness in a variety of reputation-based systems including those used in sensor networks, mobile ad-hoc networks, e-commerce, and collaborative environments.

BIOGRAPHY

Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan (T. K. Prasad) is a Professor at Kno.e.sis - Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing, Wright State University, Dayton, OH-45435. His primary research interests are in the areas of Web 3.0 including Trusted Semantic Sensor Web, Analysis of Social Media, Integration of Web of Documents and Data, and Information Extraction and Retrieval (and more generally in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning). His recent research has been funded by AFRL and NSF.

T2: Collaborative Document Management and Knowledge Work (2.5 hrs)

Steinar Kristoffersen

Østfold University College & Møreforskning AS Molde, Halden, Norway

BRIEF TUTORIAL DESCRIPTION

This tutorial introduces information design, architecture and technology topics related to collaborative document production, version control and planning in large engineering projects, within the broader scope of knowledge management. The central part of the tutorial is an introduction, analysis and lessons learned from representative research directions dealing with knowledge management and information spaces. Examples are taken from the technical domains of one-off or small-series construction of offshore installations and vessels.

It is often the starting point for examinations of this topic that assertions about the state of the work can be refined from data to information to knowledge. Furthermore, knowledge is either explicit of tacit, for instance. The problem is that both these categorizations are rather coarse and not easily operationalized in design work with state-of-the-art technologies, such as Microsoft Sharepoint Server ©® or the semantic web. The definitions of the concepts make them rather evasive, and at certain levels they seem unrepresentable in an IT-system.

This tutorial briefly surveys the historical development of “organizational memory”, before moving to different strategies for representing and supporting knowledge work in a very demanding domain where people as well as organizations collaborate across a widely distributed value chain. The tutorial is not intended mainly as a technology review or implementation-oriented session. It will, however, provide some illustrative examples from case studies, which are trying to put relevant technologies to use.

BIOGRAPHY

Steinar Kristoffersen, holding a DPhil. in Computing from Lancaster University is a Professor of Information Technology at Østfold University College, where he has been teaching Interaction Design and Mobile IT since 2007. He is also a researcher at Møreforskning AS Molde, where he works with applied science in logistics and IT. He has previously been a consultant and entrepreneur, and spent time at the University of Oslo as well as Gothenburg. Steinar Kristioffersen has published in other IFIP conferences previously, as well as CHI, ECSCW, Ubicomp as well as international journals in information systems, e-commerce and ubiquitous computing.

T3: Models of Coordination in Multiagent Decision Making (3.0 hrs)

Christopher Amato

Computer Science & Artificial intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), MIT, MA, USA

BRIEF TUTORIAL DESCRIPTION

The past ten years have seen rapid developments in planning under uncertainty for multi-agent systems, based on extensions of Markov decision processes and game-theoretic frameworks. Situations that require decentralized planning and coordination, where a group of agents is trying to achieve a set of objectives, abound in practice. They arise in application areas such as control of autonomous space exploration vehicles, distributed networks of sensors or robots for target identification and tracking, information gathering agents, distributed control of power grids, and load balancing. What makes these problems particularly challenging is the fact that decision makers may have different partial information about the overall situation and they cannot share constantly all their information. This tutorial surveys recent formal models, algorithms and applications being targeted, aiming to introduce graduate students as well as mature researchers to this emerging field.

BIOGRAPHY

Christopher Amato is a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT where he works on planning under uncertainty and learning approaches for single and multiagent domains. He received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2010 where his thesis made a number of new contributions to centralized and decentralized sequential decision-making under uncertainty using the POMDP and Dec-POMDP models. After graduation, Dr. Amato was a Research Scientist at Aptima, Inc. where he worked on applying his research and developing new planning and learning methods for defense and space applications. He has published papers on his research in leading journals and conferences (such as JAIR, JAAMAS, IJCAI, AAAI and AAMAS) as well as successfully co-organized tutorials on team decision making at IJCAI 2009, AAMAS 2010 and AAMAS 2011. More details about his research are available from his webpage at: http://people.csail.mit.edu/camato/.

T4: Socialization of Newcomers in Online Communities (3.0 hrs)

Rosta Farzan

Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, PA, USA

BRIEF TUTORIAL DESCRIPTION

Online communities are becoming increasingly important; they create the software that drives the Internet, generate valuable scientific data, and build history’s largest encyclopedia. In the face of inevitable turnover, every online community must incorporate successive generations of newcomers to survive. Newcomers are a source of content, labor, new ideas and audience. However, attracting and incorporating newcomers into existing communities can be difficult. Socialization is the process of teaching newcomers the behaviors and attitudes essential to playing their roles in the community. Research from offline organizations shows that organizations’ use of institutionalized socialization tactics and newcomers’ active information seeking are effective in increasing newcomers’ commitment to the organization. However, those tactics are not commonly used in online communities and seem to have different effects when they are used. In this tutorial we will discuss the challenges of socialization of newcomers in online communities, existing tactics in online communities for dealing with newcomers, and design guidelines for online communities to improve the experience of newcomers and their commitment to the community.

BIOGRAPHY

Rosta Farzan is a postdoctoral researcher at Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her PhD in Intelligent Systems from the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include development of information systems to support online communities, and social impact of computing. She has been pursuing her research in this field for more 8 years and has published a number of articles in major conferences in the field. She has been collaborating with several different research groups in academia and industry. She is actively participating in the scientific community by teaching guest lectures and presenting workshops in the area. Her research has been funded by several fellowships, most recently including National Science Foundation Fellowship and Andrew Mellon Fellowship.

T5: Security of Cloud Computing, Storage, and Networking (4.0 hrs)

Mohamed Hamdi

School of Communication Engineering, Tunisia

BRIEF TUTORIAL DESCRIPTION

Convergence and ubiquity are the key characteristics of tomorrow’s service provision infrastructures. Cloud architectures will constitute cost-efficient backbones that will support the transmission, storage, and computing of the applications contents. These architectures can be used for business, scientific, and pervasive computing purposes. The diversity of the services delivered through cloud infrastructures increases their vulnerability to security incidents and attacks. The cost and complexity reduction requirements render the design and development of protection mechanisms even more challenging. In addition, key design features such as confidentiality, privacy, authentication, anonymity, survivability, dependability, and fault-tolerance are, in some extent, conflicting. The objective of this tutorial is to present the state-of-the-art of security and explore research directions and technology trends to address the protection of cloud communications and networking infrastructures. An emphasis will be made on the collaboration of mobile devices in cloud based infrastructures. The fundamental concepts of cloud computing security will be explored, including cloud security services, cloud security principles, cloud security requirements, and testing techniques.

BIOGRAPHY

Mohamed Hamdi (PhD, habilitation) co-authored more than 80 scientific publications published in international journals and conferences. He is the chair of the 'Cloud security' industry forum in the IEEE ICC'12 conference (Ottawa, Canada). He has also chaired and co-chaired international conferences and served as guest editor for special issues. He presented multiple tutorials and invited speeches in international conferences such as the GEOSS Forum (Globecom 2011). He also passed prestigious professional certifications including the CISSP and the CISCO Security certifications. He is conducting research activities in the areas of wireless sensor networks, risk management, algebraic modeling, cloud security, intrusion detection, and network forensics.

T6: P2P Networks: File Sharing to Collaborative Computing and Data Fusion (4.0 hrs)

Anura Jayasumana

Colorado State University - Fort Collins, CO, USA

BRIEF TUTORIAL DESCRIPTION

Moving beyond traditional file sharing applications, collaborative Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems are emerging capable of pooling multi-attribute resources on demand, and using those resources collaboratively. They rely on discovery and utilization of diverse, multi-attribute, distributed, and dynamic groups of resources to achieve greater tasks beyond conventional P2P applications such as file sharing. Collaborations involving application specific resources and dynamic quality of service goals are stressing current P2P architectures. Salient features of collaborative P2P systems are addressed. Resource advertising, selecting, matching, and binding, the critical phases in these systems, and their associated challenges are reviewed using examples from distributed collaborative adaptive sensing systems, cloud computing, and mobile social networks. State-of-the-art resource discovery/aggregation solutions will be addressed with respect to their architecture, lookup overhead, load balancing, etc., to determine their ability meet the goals and challenges of each critical phase. Open issues and research opportunities will be discussed that are essential in achieving the true potential of collaborative P2P systems.

The tutorial will provide a survey of P2P networking protocols, followed by an in-depth look at the emerging P2P techniques for multi-attribute resource sharing and organization.

BIOGRAPHY

Anura Jayasumana is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Colorado State University. He also holds a joint appointment in Computer Science. He is a member of NSF Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere. He received the B.Sc. (Electronics & Telecommunications) from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, and his M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University. His areas of expertise include Computer and Communication Networks, Protocols and Applications for Next Generation Internet, Optical Networks, and Sensor Networks. He has served extensively as a consultant to industry, ranging from startups to Fortune 100 companies. He has supervised over 70 M.S. and Ph.D. theses, holds two patents, and is the co-author of a book and over 200 papers. The awards he has received include the Outstanding Faculty of the Year Award from the Mountain States Council of American Electronics Association.

T7: Introduction to Complexity in Collaborative Environments (2.5 hrs)

SK Semwal, George Mudrak, Mike Bolei

University of Colorado - Colorado Springs, CO, USA

BRIEF TUTORIAL DESCRIPTION

Modeling non-linearity can pose challenges when we attempt to understand human-human and human-computer interaction in collaborative environments. Generative systems, where simple local interaction can create global phenomena are some examples of computationally generated complexity and emergence available for such interaction. Emergence of large-scale behaviors, adaptation, and new unanticipated form of interactions are some examples of such systems found in nature yet hard to simulate computationally. This tutorial will look at complex systems from the point of view of wearable and mobile environments where multiple participants interact. We will discuss theoretical limits of computation in the complexity area. The discussion will be followed by examples of local interaction at different scales. The tutorial has four components: first will be a gentle introduction to Complexity [1]. Next, we will discuss a simulation environment called NetLogo™ followed by an example of our experience of simulating an AgentCity with NetLogo™. Our second example will be on simulating particles on GPUs. This experiment will show possible visual emergence when particles interact with each other and their environment. Our third example will be a discussion of emergence and behavior patterns in popular massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). This is interaction at the social level. Rich interactions suits are provided by MMORPG platforms where players end up in the same logical game-space even if they are separated by large distances. Emergence and patterns are commonplace in game play in MMORPGs and contribute to their success and popularity. Because MMORPGs are precursor to collaborative environments of possibly today and tomorrow, we claim that similar patterns of behavior should be observable or should be expected by researchers working in collaborative environments fueled by technology. Thus, this tutorial is expected to be useful for researchers and graduate students who are interested in understanding complexity of interactions in a collaborative environment that are being created by possibilities of wearable, and mobile/wireless internet enabled devices in augmented, ubiquitous virtual environments.

BIOGRAPHIES


Sudhanshu K. Semwal joined the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (UCCS) in 1987. He has published more than sixty refereed technical papers in the areas of graphics, VR, Wearable Computing, visualization, and human animation. He is now a tenured professor in the Department of Computer Science and served as Department Chair (2002). He started the MS Computer Science program in Media Convergence, Games and Media Integration (The GMI) Program, the GMI Lab and co-founded CoView Data Labs™. A visiting summer researcher at the Advanced Telecommunication Research (ATR), Kyoto in 97-99, 2002-03, and Central Research Laboratory (CRL), Matsushita (Panasonic) Osaka (1991-92); also worked as a scientist at the Sandia National Laboratory, Albuquerque, NM, during 1995.

George Mudrak is pursuing his MS and PhD at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs with Dr. Semwal. He has spent 20 years in the information technology field with experience in Enterprise Data and Information Architecture and all aspects of software development. He is currently employed at Verizon as a Senior Network Security Engineer. He is a Microsoft Certified Professional and holds a BS in Computer Science and a BA in Psychology. He contributed to the SQL Server 2005 Bible and presented at the 2006 Pervasive IntegrationNext user conference on complex data and services. His main area of interest is in Complex Systems that bridge Social, Economic and Technological issues people face today.

Mike Bolei holds a BS in Computer Science, and is currently working towards a Masters at the University of Colorado with a focus on Human-Computer Interaction, real-time graphics techniques, and GPU programming. He has several years of industry experience in application and embedded systems design, as well as networking architecture.