Abstract
Collaboration tools and problem solving environments (PSEs) have historically evolved independently, despite the fact that most of their developers would agree that transitions between team and individual work are facile and frequent in the real world. The explanation of this paradox has roots in both technology limitations and our lack of understanding of the details of how team and individual work are related and how to encode those relations in software. Progress is being made in both of these areas, and, as a result, there is growing interest in discussion between the collaborative systems and PSE communities, and a growing number of systems that provide collaboration and PSE functionality. We envision this Collaborative Problem-Solving Environments (CPSEs) minitrack as a forum for bringing these communities together and hope that the selected papers will provide the basis for a lively discussion of the issues involved in designing, developing, and deploying CPSEs in science and engineering.The call for this minitrack elicited a very diverse set of papers that clearly mirrors the diverse backgrounds and research directions of the authors. We have tried to preserve that diversity - in the emphasis of collaboration versus single-user features, and in architecture and interface design choices and assumptions - through the review process. Professionals working in a variety of CPSE-related areas and the minitrack chairs reviewed papers. The resulting group of accepted papers speaks to many different interests and issues, yet they have a sense of coherence.We have grouped the ten accepted papers into four overlapping and non-exclusive categories for the purposes of introduction and ordering the program. The first set emphasizes collaboration. The paper by Steves, Ranganathan, and Morse, “SMAT: Synchronous Multimedia and Annotation Tool”, describes a system that allows collaborative textual annotation of temporal diagnostic data from robotic welding systems.The paper by Kaur, Mann, Matossian, Muralidhar and Parashar, “Engineering a Distributed Computational Collaboratory,” describes the DIOS framework for real-time collaborative computational steering. Beca's paper, “Building Collaborative Problem-Solving Environments as Shared Places” describes a framework and XML-based language for creating persistent virtual places that present collaborative interfaces to underlying problem solving tools.The second group of papers focuses on access to computational grid resources. In their “Designing Grid-based Problem Solving Environments and Portals”, von Laszewski and Foster describe the development of 'Commodity Grid (COG)' toolkits that simplify the integration of grid resources into portals and other CPSE frameworks. Rana and Walker's “Agent based Service Integration for Distributed Problem Solving Environments” proposes the use of agents for negotiating use of computational, application, and storage resources on a user's behalf.The next set of papers shift the focus from technologies to a more general discussion of CPSE requirements, design principles, and usability in deployed systems. In “Collaborative Toolkit for Crashworthiness Research”, Simunovic, Bobrek, and Aramayo discuss the performance, data fusion, usability, and collaboration issues they faced in the development of an environment for analyzing vehicle crash test experiments and modeling. Kleban, Stubblefield, Mitchiner, Mitchiner and Arms present another engineering related CPSE in “Collaborative Evaluation of Early Design Decisions and Product Manufacturability”. Their paper discusses issues related to providing support for the creative, unstructured processes typical of research and, in their case, early product design. Watson's paper, “Supporting Scientific Analysis within Collaborative Problem Solving Environments”, describes issues related to synchronous collaboration in the visualization and analysis of large data sets and asynchronous review and continuation of analyses in the context of work in computational fluid dynamics.The final two papers continue the discussion about design and requirements, but shift the focus to tomorrow's CPSEs. In “A Reconfigurable Component-based Problem Solving Environment”, Hawick, James, and Coddington discuss user composition of multi-step processing requests and flexible scheduling of these steps in the context of their DISCWorld system. Towell and Towell cogitate on the origin of a “sense of place” in virtual environments in “Virtual Scientific Collaboration and Nonaka's Ba”. They present the results of their survey of students using a textual MOO environment, raising questions about how virtual environments can provide ambiance conducive to different stages of knowledge creation.We believe this minitrack's mixture of infrastructure and interface, of practice and possibility, will be of interest to a broad range of HICSS participants, and will lead to productive discussions, within the minitrack and across the conference, on the emerging topic of CPSEs. We hope you enjoy the papers and the discussions they generate.