ABSTRACT Today’s cheaper personal computers with improved computational power have made the technology of networked desktop virtual reality environments accessible to typical end users, including students. This paper describes C–VISions, a collaborative virtual environment developed to support interactive and collaborative learning using virtual simulations. The research effort is grounded on t...

Collaborative systems will form the warp for smart networked environments wherein humans, organizations, intelligent agents, and devices collaborate. The smart environments of near future will be context sensitive systems within which the physical world is richly and transparently interwoven with sensors, actuators, and computational elements that seamlessly embed everyday objects and interconn...

Few studies have focused on how youth develop agency to organize and participate in online unstructured creative collaborations. This paper describes and analyzes how youth programmers organized collaborative groups in response to a programming “Collab Challenge” in the Scratch Online Community and in an accompanying workshop with high school students. The analyses focused on modalities of onli...

The development and refinement of natural-language communication systems among networked individuals is not well understood and difficult to study. This paper uses a task providing a controlled environment for the goal-oriented, collaborative exchange of short, natural-language messages between experimental participants (20 per group) in order to demonstrate lexical convergence. A technique for...

Leveraged by the advances in communication and information Technologies, producers and consumers are developing a new behavior. Together with the new emerging collaborative manifestations this behavior may directly impact the way products are developed. This powerful combination indicates that consumers will be involved in a very early stage in product development processes supporting even more...

Collaborative network theory can be useful in refining current understanding of criminal networks and aid in understanding their evolution. Drug trafficking organizations that operate in the region directly north of Colombia’s Valle del Cauca department and the “collection agencies” that operate in the Colombian city of Cali have abandoned hierarchical organizational structures and have become ...

Virtual environments define a new interface for networked multimedia applications. The sense of "presence" in the virtual environment is an important requirement for collaborative activities involving multiple remote users working with social interactions. Using virtual actors within the shared environment is a supporting tool for presence. In this paper, we present a shared virtual life networ...

Key problems in manufacturing plant control, modeling and information management, enterprise integration and interoperability, and large-scale complex systems are described. Recent major accomplishments in developing solution methods and tools are reviewed in e-Manufacturing, e-Service, and bio-inspired manufacturing and control; Real-time, cooperative/collaborative enterprises; autonomous, col...

Socio-technical research draws from the rich theoretical and applied literature that addresses the influence of technology on society and on social practices, and of social influences on the shaping of technology. Notable examples include the Social Shaping of Technology (SST) tradition, which is based on social studies of science and technology (cf. Williams and Edge, 1995), the Tavistock Inst...