ABSTRACT

Collaboration services promise to improve the engagement and effectiveness of humans across geospatial, temporal, and organizational boundaries. However, there also are many examples of collaboration failures. After a brief introduction to collaboration services, this tutorial will describe several successful deployments of state-of-the-art collaboration environments and exemplify and demonstrate the use of collaboration services to enhance human activities. We will summarize key lessons learned and report a generalized process to increase the likelihood of successful collaboration. The tutorial lasts a full day and is primarily a lecture with video demonstrations. An on-line version of the tutorial will be made accessible at http://itc.mitre.org.

Keywords

Collaboration, distributed virtual collaboration, conferencing, shared applications, workflow, collaboration capability maturity model (C-CMM), air operations, intelligence.

Target Audience

This tutorial is intended for researchers, practitioners, and program managers in industry, government, and academia interested in designing, deploying and/or evaluating collaboration services to enhance organizations. There is no prerequisite knowledge required, although general knowledge of collaboration will enhance the value of this course for participants. This tutorial is not an evaluation of or recommendation for any specific tool, rather a report of knowledge and lessons learned from over a decade of experience with multiple collaboration environments in operational settings.

Tutorial Structure

The tutorial is organized into the following sections:

§ Collaboration Services

§ Collaborative Air Operations

§ Collaborative National Intelligence

§ Collaboration in Iraq

§ Coalition Collaboration

§ Best Practices for Success

§ Collaboration Capability Maturity Model

§ Evaluating Collaboration Services

The tutorial will include animations and video demonstrations of deployed collaboration systems.

INSTRUCTOR

Mark Maybury received his M.Phil. in Computer Speech and Language Processing (1987), an MBA from RPI (1989), and his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence (1991) for his dissertation, “Generating Multisentential Text using Communicative Acts” at Cambridge University. Mark has organised international symposia, given tutorials, and published over fifty articles in the area of language generation, multimedia presentation, text summarization, and intelligent information retrieval. Mark is co-author of Information Storage and Retrieval: Theory and Implementation. 2^nd Edition (Kluwer Academic 2000); editor of Intelligent Multimedia Interfaces (AAAI/MIT Press 1993), Intelligent Multimedia Information Retrieval (AAAI/MIT Press, 1997), New Directions in Question Answering (AAAI/MIT Press 2004); co-editor of Readings on Intelligent User Interfaces (Morgan Kaufmann Press 1998), Advances in Text Summarization (MIT Press 1999), Advances in Knowledge Management: Classic and Contemporary Works (MIT Press, 2001), and Personalized Digital Television (Kluwer Academic 2004). Mark is Executive Director of MITRE’s Information Technology Division, Executive Director of the ARDA Northeast Regional Research Center (nrrc.mitre.org) and member of the OMG Board of Directors.

REFERENCES

1. “A Common Platform for the Foreign Affairs Community: Collaborative Computing & Knowledge Management” Presented to Committee on International Relations. United States House of Representatives, Hearing on State Department, Technology Modernization and Computer Security. 22 June 2000.

2. Hall, T. July 2000. Practitioner’s Guide to Evaluating Collaboration Systems. Prepared for the Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production and the Office of Advanced Analytic Tools. collaboration.mitre.org/practguide/PractionersGuide.html

3. Maybury, M. December 2001. Collaborative Virtual Environments for Analysis and Decision Support. Communications of the ACM 14(12): 51-54. portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=501342&dl=ACM&coll=GUIDE. www.mitre.org/work/tech_papers/tech_papers_01/maybury_collaborative/index.html

4. Maybury, M., D’Amore, R, and House, D. December 2001. Expert Finding for Collaborative Virtual Environments. Communications of the ACM 14(12): 55-56

5. Maybury, M. October 2004. CPA Collaboration Pilot Evaluation: Final Report. Prepared for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) Information Management Unit. MTR-04B-47.

6. Maybury, M. T. 1995. Distributed, Collaborative, Knowledge Based Air Campaign Planning. Proceedings of the NATO/AGARD Lecture Series 200 on Knowledge-Based Functions in Aerospace Mission Systems, November 6-17 1995, Torrejon, Spain, Chatillon, France, and NASA Ames, CA. pp. 2-1 - 2-13.

www.mitre.org/work/tech_papers/tech_papers_97/dc_kkb

7. Carlson, J., Deus, L., Holland, R., Kordash, J., Krutsch, M., Kurtz, J., Ramsdell, J., and Maybury, M. Collaboration Services Specification. Object Management Group.; www.objs.com/isig/wg-cscw01.html or jcs.mitre.org.

8. Spellman, P. J., Mosier, J. N., Deus, L. M., and Carlson, J. A.collaborative virtual workspace. In Proceedings of International ACM SIGGROUP Conference of Supporting Group Work. (Nov. 16–19, 1997, Phoenix, AZ.) ACM Press, NY. Also see sourceforge.net/projects/cvw.