Agent Supported Cooperative Work

Improvements in computer networking have heralded great expectations for computer-mediated distributed work. However, experience has revealed that, as information flow improves, a central problem for distributed workers is the administration, management and control of that information. Research into Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) investigates design methods and technologies for the support of collaboration, communication and coordination of distributed group work, both within and among organizations. In tandem with this focus on the support of distributed communication and collaboration, there have been exciting developments in the fields of Intelligent Agents and Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI), notably in the concepts, theories and deployment of intelligent agents as a means of distributing computer-based problem solving expertise. The paradigm of multi-agent systems forms a proposed basis for the design of CSCW architectures, the support of CSCW operations and for addressing some of the problems of cooperative working. The application of a multi-agent approach to CSCW makes information exchange among the participants easier by delivering support to the participants, assisting workflows and procedures, and providing convenient user interfaces to CSCW systems. Furthermore, the ideas inherent in such an approach are also applicable to other domains, such as support for interactive learning. Organizations that seek to exploit the advantages offered through CSCW will benefit from the integration of agents in the management and use of their corporate knowledge, especially with the advancement of wired or wireless networking, pervasive computing, and other information technologies. Agent Supported Cooperative Work describes the state of the art in this exciting new area, covering both theoretical foundations and practical applications of ASCW. It is the first book explicitly dedicated to ASCW, bringing together contributions from international experts in the field.

A detailed introduction to interdisciplinary application area of distributed systems, namely the computer support of individuals trying to solve a problem in cooperation with each other but not necessarily having identical work places or working times. The book is addressed to students of distributed systems, communications, information science and socio-organizational theory, as well as to users and developers of systems with group communication and cooperation as top priorities.

Computer-supported co-operative work (CSCW) is a research area that aims at integrating the works of several people involved in a common goal, inside a co-operative universe, through the sharing of resources in an efficient way. This report contains the papers presented at a conference on CSCW in design. Topics covered include: techniques, methods, and tools for CSCW in design; social organization of the CSCW process; integration of methods & tools within the work organization; co-operation in virtual enterprises and electronic businesses; CSCW in design & manufacturing; interaction between the CSCW approach and knowledge reuse as found in knowledge management; intelligent agent & multi-agent systems; Internet/World Wide Web and CSCW in design; and applications & test beds.

The phrases the information superhighway and the the information societyare on almost everyone's lips. CSCW and groupware systems are the key to bringing those phrases to life. To an extent that would scarcely have been imaginable a few years ago, the contributions in this volume speak to each other and to a broader interdisciplinary context. The areas of ethnography and design, the requirements and principles of CSCW design, CSCW languages and environments, and the evaluation of CSCW systems are brought together, to bring to light how activities in working domains are really in practice, carried out. The aim above all is to do justice to the creativity and versatility of those whose work they aim to support.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, CSCWD 2005, held in Coventry, UK, in May 2005. The 65 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions during at least two rounds of reviewing and improvement.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, CSCWD 2006, held in Nanjing, China in May 2006. Among topics covered are CSCW techniques and methods, collaborative design, collaborative manufacturing and enterprise collaboration, Web services, knowledge management, security and privacy in CSCW systems, workflow management, and e-learning.

The design of complex artifacts and systems requires the cooperation of multidisciplinary design teams using multiple commercial and non-commercial engineering tools such as CAD tools, modeling, simulation and optimization software, engineering databases, and knowledge-based systems. Individuals or individual groups of multidisciplinary design teams usually work in parallel and separately with various engineering tools, which are located on different sites, often for quite a long time. At any moment, individual members may be working on different versions of a design or viewing the design from various perspectives, at different levels of detail. In order to meet these requirements, it is necessary to have effective and efficient collaborative design environments. These environments should not only automate individual tasks, in the manner of traditional computer-aided engineering tools, but also enable individual members to share information, collaborate and coordinate their activities within the context of a design project. CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) in design is concerned with the development of such environments.

The two-volume set CCIS 1491 and 1492 constitutes the refereed post-conferenceproceedings of the 16th CCF Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, ChineseCSCW 2021, held in Xiangtan, China, November 26–28, 2021. The conference was held in a hybrid mode i.e. online and on-site in Xiangtan due to the COVID-19 crisis. The 65 revised full papers and 22 revised short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 242 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: Volume I: Collaborative Mechanisms, Models, Approaches, Algorithms and Systems; Cooperative Evolutionary Computation and Human-like Intelligent Collaboration; Domain-Specific Collaborative Applications; Volume II: Crowd Intelligence and Crowd Cooperative Computing; Social Media and Online Communities.