Collaboration

An entertaining history of Collaboration - what was the first collaboration? How well have new tools for communication been accepted throughout history? What are current practical and research questions in developing useable tools?

Jill Gemmill, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), is Assistant Director for the Department of Academic Computing, Office of the Vice President for Information Technology and Research Assistant Professor, Department of Computer and Information Sciences. Co-author of "ViDe H.350 Cookbook: Directory Services Middleware for Multimedia Conferencing", Jill has been involved with H.350 from inception to current deployment. A past Chair of ViDe and contributor to the popular "ViDe Videoconferencing Cookbook", Jill currently chairs the Internet2 Middleware-Enabled Mailing List Working Group (MACE-MLIST). Jill's current research focuses on integration of middleware with collaborative technologies and her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, Southeastern Universities Research Association, and the UAB Health Services Foundation.

At the University of Michigan, personnel at the School of Information are split nearly evenly between two buildings that are nearly three miles apart, making the virtual organization of tomorrow a reality today for faculty, staff and students. This talk will provide an introduction to the Connection Project, an experiment in the development, deployment and evaluation of high-quality conferencing technologies within the School of Information using the University's shared network infrastructure. The project leverages a number of high-bandwidth technologies, such as DVTS and high-resolution MPEG-4 capture, to provide an extremely high quality conferencing experience between the two locations. This presentation will focus on the design and deployment of the facilities and will present early findings from studies of collaboration using the facilities.

Erik Hofer works at the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work at the University of Michigan School of Information. His research focuses on the use of collaborative technologies to support distributed scientific and engineering work. He is an active member of the Internet2 community, serving on the Internet2 Commons Management Team.

Descent to the Underworld is a multi-national collaborative project, based on the Game-FilmÓ platform. It brings together students via Internet2's Abilene network and its international partner networks from Asia, Europe, South America and the United States. Using Internet2's Abilene network and Access Grid communication software, the students meet weekly to interpret the storyline and build the media assets for the film. Each team will create their own version of the story, compiling a database of film clips. When the game is played, players can opt to see only the film clips from a specific team, or players can select a random generation of the clips, so that the end film - while based on the same story - is spun from a variety of different, cultural sources.

Nora Barry is a creator, producer and curator of networked Internet video events, web cinema and online digital media art. Barry launched the first online venue for web-based films, The Bit Screen, in 1998. She also developed and produced the first off-line festival of online films, Streaming Cinema, which screened eight times in three years at venues around the world. Barry curated an exhibit, A History of Web Cinema, for the international show, Future Cinema, at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Germany, and wrote a chapter for the book which accompanied the exhibit, published by MIT Press. That essay, Telling Tales Online: A History of Web Cinema, will be included in an anthology of new media to be published in 2005 by the Academy of Fine Arts in Slovakia. She also wrote Digital Shanachies for the Ars Electronica text, Takeover: Who's Doing the Art of Tomorrow. Barry is currently working on an article about the dominance of visual images over text in a technology-based culture for Human Affairs, an international journal for humanities and social sciences. In 2003 Barry produced Story Streams, the first online, real-time collaborative film, with nodes in Montreal, Mexico City, Paris and Philadelphia.