Complex modern-day artifacts are designed cooperatively by groups of experts, each with their own areas of expertise. The interaction of such experts inevitably involves conflict. This paper presents an implemented computational model, based on studies of human cooperative design, for supporting the resolution of such conflicts. This model is based centrally on the insights that general conflic...

Mobile agents are typically referred as a very adequate paradigm for using in mobile and disconnected computing environments. They are autonomous, have a strong sense of location and are able to operate independently of a central server. Nevertheless, although this is true, for developing a mobile agent system that is capable of operating in a disconnected computing environment, much more is ne...

This study compared the effectiveness of two knowledge management system designs in supporting individual decision makers in a predictive judgement task. The black-box versus white-box system design was varied to allow for automating versus informating support in cue weighting and combination stages of the judgement process. The main findings indicate that only the white-box system design was e...

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems have been very successful for large-scale data sharing. However, sharing sensitive data, like in online social networks, without appropriate access control, can have undesirable impact on data privacy. Data can be accessed by everyone (by potentially untrusted peers) and used for everything (e.g., for marketing or activities against the owner’s preferences or ethics)....

Interactive learning environments have been built to support various audiences from preschool to university students. However, it is not yet known how to bring the great promise of tutorial dialogue systems, which engage students in rich natural language, to bear for young learners such as those in grades K-5. This doctoral consortium paper presents our goal of developing a dialogue system in t...

Body-based interaction constitutes a very intuitive way for humans to communicate with their environment but also among themselves. Nowadays, various technological solutions allow for fast and robust, noninstrumented body tracking at various levels of granularity and sophistication. This chapter studies three distinct cases showcasing different representative approaches of employing body-based ...

Open distributed systems will increasingly be used to support business transactions within and across organisations. In order to achieve this goal, fundamental concepts of business practices should be incorporated into a supporting architecture. Support for business contracts can be regarded as an essential ingredient of such an architecture in terms of facilitating more efficient inter-organis...

Information is the master key to economic success and influence in the contemporary information society. “Only who can apply the newest information for his product development, is able to survive in the global competition” [Sch 95]. Crucial for the applicability of information is its quality and its fast availability. What is lacking most, however, is not the access to information resources but...

Mobile computers and communication devices are establishing themselves as ubiquitous features of daily life. This development is linked to tremendous growth in the number and sophistication of mobile and mobile-aware software applications. Increasingly, such applications need access to information about their own and other objects' physical locations, a requirement known as location-awareness. ...

To effectively support today’s global economy, database systems need to store and manipulate text data in multiple languages simultaneously. Current database systems do support the storage and management of multilingual data, but are not capable of querying or matching text data across different scripts. As a first step towards addressing this lacuna, we propose here a new query operator called...