In technical cooperation with the IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, and IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society

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. This keynote will describe several successful deployments of state of the art collaboration environments and exemplify and demonstrate the use of collaboration services to enhance team endeavors. We will highlight both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration services such as conferencing (audio, video, text), data and application sharing, and workflow management and describe more sophisticated services including expertise location, translingual chat, and meeting transcription/summarization.

We will describe successful collaboration deployments in several domains including joint air operations, intelligence, and coalition operations. Operational outcomes have included dramatic effects such as a doubling the level of situational awareness, cutting in half the time to perform operations, significantly reducing forward deployed personnel, and transforming serial operations into parallel ones. Video and pictures from real world operations will highlight both enablers of and impediments to successful collaboration. This talk will not evaluate or recommend any specific tools, rather report experiences and lessons learned from over a decade of experience with multiple collaboration environments in operational settings. We will summarize key lessons learned and outline collaboration best practices that promise to increase the likelihood of successful collaboration. This includes efforts that address technology, process, and culture challenges and that ensure successful awareness, information sharing, joint action, and, ultimately, goal alignment. We will introduce a Collaboration Capability Maturity Model (C-CMM) that describes key elements underlying collaboration process maturity.

BIOGRAPHY

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. 2nd 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. 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.

2. "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.

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.

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.