A Creative Environment for Mobile Knowledge Workers

1
A Creative Environment for Mobile Knowledge
Workers
mTeam

• Anwitaman Datta (PI, NTU Singapore)
• Adam Wierzbicki (PI, PJIIT Poland)
• Sun Chengzheng (Co-PI, NTU Singapore)

2
Collaborative Innovation Networks

• Knowledge economy the new reality
• also called Collaborative Innovation Networks
  COINS
• typically these are self-organizing, open systems
• source Peter Gloor (MIT Sloan), Competitive
  Advantage through Collaborative Innovation
  Networks, Oxford University Press, 2006
  www.swarmcreativity.net
• Examples of COINS
• Linux developers
• Development of WWW in CERN
• Wikipedia
• Really, most innovative projects today
  including business

3
Types of COIN members

• Communicators (Interested users)
• last tier of the COIN
• information seekers (readers)
• communicate new ideas outside
• example Linux Users

• Creators
• the core of the COIN
• need to be creative, collaborative, fair
• example Linux Creators
• Collaborators
• share common knowledge and experience
• work together to realize, improve, test new ideas
• example Linux Maintainers

4
Properties of COINS

• Swarm creativity
• creativity seen as an emergent property of an
  open system
• Social network
• essential for finding required collaborators
• Sharing and frequent communication
• information is freely shared among trusted,
  cooperating persons
• Virtual trust through ethical code
• Trust is established through following an ethical
  code requiring recognition of others input,
  meritocracy

5
mTeam agenda

• Enabling the creation of applications that would
  use social networks and mobility to find new
  collaboration opportunities and tools to support
  collaboration
• In other words enable building a COIN in a
  nomadic environment, supporting mobility
• a heterogenous environment fixed/mobile
• Supporting nomadic teams
• needs
• social network
• environment for sharing
• trust, access control, security (in a
  decentralized setting)
• resource discovery and communication primitives

6
mTeam goals

• 3D social network
• expresses tacit knowledge about environment of a
  user (mental map)
• includes familiarity, skills/experience,
  trust/reputation
• Collaboration tools
• a middleware for typical collaboration
  activities/functions
• Handling heterogenous mobile environment and the
  inherent distributed/decentralized setting using
  a P2P information systems infrastructure

7
mTeam deliverables

• TeamCreator
• uses the social network to recommend and buld a
  team to solve a problem
• build a team from a COIN
• form a new COIN
• restructure a team
• negotiate rules of engagement in the team (who
  does what, when, etc.)
• TeamEnvironment
• uses collaboration middleware to enable a team to
  work on shared information
• includes a distributed versioning system
• gives users rich context awareness
• allows collaborators to communicate
• gathers social information required to build
  social network

8
mTeam architecture (tentative)
TOP
TEAMCREATOR
TEAMENVIRONMENT
Social information
3D SOCIALNETWORK
COLLABORATIONMIDDLEWARE
MIDDLE
P2P-SIP
Publish-subscribe
Trust Management
Routing/Multicast
Reliability
Security
P2P Overlay Network
Network Management
BOTTOM
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Collaboration middleware functions

• Session management
• Conference management
• Group management
• Data synchronization
• Data sharing

• Presence
• Workspace awareness
• Event management
• Access control
• Trust management

10
P2P information system

• Share the resources of individual peers
• CPU, disk, bandwidth, information,

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Basic P2P layer functions

• Routing and information search
• it can be constrained by other requirements,
  such as trust
• Publish-subscribe
• subscribe to a topic, publish, notify
• in ad-hoc environments, needs to be
  delay-tolerant
• Multicast
• special case of publish-subscribe
• etc

12
Research issues
The project will investigate the full-spectrum of
research topics and technologies to enable
nomadic collaboration or collaboration on the go,
including algorithmic foundations and basic
research on Networked Distributed Systems which
will support upper layer functionalities and
ubiquity independent of device and location,
Social Networking to facilitate new collaboration
opportunities and finally the Collaboration Tools
themselves to carry out the tasks and manage such
collaborations.
13
Research issues

• Privacy issues (beyond the scope of mTeams
  requirements) as well as some common security
  issues
• Informal collaboration between NTU Singapore
  Deutsche Telekom Laboratories (Berlin)

14
Research issues
15
Research issues
16
Technical issues Open standards and open sources

• Whether and how much to use SIP ?
• How standard will interfaces like P2PP be ?
• Open source Android SDK or some other
  environments for mobile devices ?
• Politics of hardware/cellular service providers,
  etc.
• UMPCs

17
Proof of concept Driver Applications

• Not part of the original deliverables
• An collaborative editing application for research
  papers, capable of sharing and reviewing academic
  literature and news, as well as finding relevant
  collaboration opportunities
• Ongoing
• An application geared specifically to facilitate
  collaboration among environment scientists
• Tentative (pending a Swiss/Singapore joint
  project on cyber-infrastructure for environment
  monitoring and modeling)

18
Status

• Research work
• Ongoing literature and technology survey on
  various themes
• Tutorial on SIP, IMS and P2P-SIP at IFIP
  Networking 2008
• Book chapter (proposal accepted) Vertically
  Integrated Collaboration Middleware in Mobile P2P
  Environments
• Groundwork for first driver application well in
  progress
• Study of dynamics in open collaboration systems
  (Wikipedia)
• Hiring
• Poland
• One Ph.D. student and one research assistant
  hired
• Singapore
• Hiring is ongoing
• One PhD student is informally working on related
  security topics, as will some FYP students from
  next semester
• Project webpage http//mteam.pjwstk.edu.pl