Beyond being there: Techniques to enable geographicallydispersed collaboration

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Beyond being there Techniques to enable
geographically-dispersed collaboration

• Thomas A. FinholtSchool of InformationUniversity
  of Michigan

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Outline

• The rise of team science and engineering
• Liabilities of distance
• Leveraging cyberinfrastructure
• Leveraging socio-technical insight
• Cultural challenges
• Coordination challenges
• Summary

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1. The rise of team science and engineering

• Complex problems require diverse expertise
• Nanotechnology draws on biology, chemistry,
  physics, and engineering
• Specialists in these areas are not always
  collocated
• Phenomena need to be understood and analyzed at
  multiple size and temporal scales
• From molecules to ecologies
• From microseconds to eons

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Distributed research teams

• Researchers increasingly collaborate with
  colleagues elsewhere
• NCIBI (Brian Athey et al.)
• MAE Center (UIUC et al.)
• ECC (Victor Li et al.)
• NEES

NCIBI
ECC Technology Network
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The global virtual laboratory

• Leverage worldwide resources
• Expertise
• Labs
• Accelerate communication of findings
• Use cyberinfrastructure to knit together the far
  flung collaboration

Good morning, good day, good evening
Image source Enserink, M., Vogel, G. (2003).
Deferring competition, global network closes in
on SARS. Science, 300, 224-25.
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NEJM editorial April 2, 2003
Use of the Internet has sped information
exchange and helped overcome the problems
presented by asynchrony in the activities of
investigators in many time zones. Scientists at
the international collaborating laboratories are
exchanging laboratory results and images on a
secure Web site. Coordination of the
international response strategy has been fostered
by regular videoconferences with senior leaders
in the operations center at the WHO, the DHHS,
and the CDC. Satellite broadcasts, Webcasts, and
videoconferencing are supporting the
dissemination of emerging information to the
entire global health community.
Source http//content.nejm.org/cgi/reprint/NEJMe0
30067v1.pdf
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2. Liabilities of distance

• Reduced probability of interaction
• 30-meter rule
• Increased delay
• Distance equals delay
• Lower trust
• Trust requires touch

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The 30-meter rule
Source Allen, T.J. (1977). Managing the flow of
technology in organizations. Cambridge, MA MIT
Press.
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Distance equals delay
Source Herbsleb, Mockus, Finholt Grinter
(2000). Distance, dependencies, and delay in a
global collaboration. In Proceedings of ACM
Conference on Computer-supported Cooperative Work
CSCW 2000. New York ACM Press.
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Trust requires touch
Source Rocco, Finholt, Hofer Herbsleb (2000).
Out of sight, short of trust. Technical report,
Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work,
School of Information, University of Michigan.
Ann Arbor, MI.
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Distance matters

• Multi-institutional collaborations perform poorly
  relative to single institution collaborations
• This performance gap reflects the difficulty of
  long distance communication and coordination
• Technologies exist and are emerging to address
  this gap

Source Cummings and Kiesler (2003). KDI
Initiative Multidisciplinary scientific
collaborations. Arlington, VA National Science
Foundation
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3. Leveraging cyberinfrastructure

• Network performance doubles every 9 months
• This exceeds the current 18 month doubling rate
  of processor performance

Source Stix, G. (2001). The ultimate optical
networks The triumph of the light. Scientific
American, 284, 80-86.
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Michigan LambdaRail

• Dedicated multi-gigabit networking
• Collaborations with national high-performance
  networking projects
• Ultralight
• OptIPuter
• Internet2

Source W. Scott Gerstenberger, personal
communication.
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Reducing the wizard gap

• Capacity alone wont produce change
• We must identify applications that can take
  advantage of high bandwidth networks
• While hiding the complexity of advanced networks
  from users
• Most applications are designed assuming that
  networks are slow and scarce
• BUT the networks being built today are extremely
  fast, have vast capacity, and are increasingly
  pervasive

Source Mathis, M. (1999). Pushing up
performance for everyone. Presentation to Joint
Techs, 5 December 1999, Miami, FL.
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Ultra-resolution collaboration

• What if you could see life-sized and detailed
  video of distant collaborators?
• What if the video was set up in a way that
  preserved the ergonomics of face-to-face
  interaction?
• What if the video was coupled with a giant
  electronic canvas for displaying data?

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HD videoconferencing

• Two demonstrations
• iGrid 2005
• SC 2005
• Three prototype installations
• SI North to Palmer Commons
• SI North to CITI
• SI North to NCSA

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iGrid 2005 N-Way HD Video

• Demonstration of multipoint, HD video
  conferencing using multicast over regional and
  national research networks.
• Interactive video conference between iGrid,
  University of Washington (organizer) and
  University of Michigan
• Additional video from University of Wisconsin -
  Madison and Keio University
• 1.5 Gbps per stream using UW/Research Channel
  iHD1500 system

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Optiportals

• Ability to pan and zoom
• Comprehension
• Detail
• Keep track of multiple contexts
• Different views of the same data
• Views of complementary data

Source http//cg.calit2.uci.edu/mediawiki/index.p
hp/Research_Projects_HIPerWall.
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4a. Cultural challenges

• First contact
• NEES
• earthquake engineers vs. IT specialists

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Frobisher and the Inuit
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Earthquake engineers in Hofstedes scheme

• Power distance
• Hierarchical
• Bias toward seniority
• Individualist
• My lab is my empire
• Solo PI model
• Masculine
• Adversarial
• Competitive
• Uncertainty avoidance
• Highly skeptical of new technologies
• Extremely risk adverse

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IT specialists in Hofstedes scheme

• Power distance
• Egalitarian
• Bias toward talent
• Collectivist
• Use the Internet to create worldwide communities
• Project model
• Masculine
• Adversarial
• Competitive
• Uncertainty avoidance
• Extremely open to new technologies
• Extremely risk seeking

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Agreeing on terms
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How earthquake engineers think
Customer Need
Customer Requirements
Structure Design
Structure Construction
Structure Acceptance
Structure Operations
Customer Needs Assessment
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How IT specialists think
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What three software packages do you use most
frequently in your work?

• Other
• MS Word
• MS PowerPoint
• Statistics applications (e.g., Stata, R, S-Plus)
• SigmaPlot
• PHREEQC
• MathCAD
• FORTRAN compiler
• Mathematica
• GRASS GIS
• Groundwater models
• Modflow

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Pidgins
I dont know how to extract a representation of
the crustal deformation in 4D.
We must re-target the GUI development.
I need to give him the right dataset.
Pidgins are locally and collaboratively developed
languages which enable communication between
disparate communities of practice. Pidgins
serve to coordinate activity between the specific
technical vocabularies of the parties involved
without requiring full translation.
Courtesy of David Ribes
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Boundary Objects
Geoscience Community
Boundary Object
Education
Information Technology

• Boundary Objects both inhabit several
  intersecting worlds and satisfy the information
  requirement of each of them. Boundary objects are
  objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to
  local needs and constraints of the several
  parties employing them, yet robust enough to
  maintain a common identity across sites. They are
  weakly structured in common use, and become
  strongly structured in individual use. (Star and
  Greisemer 1989)

Courtesy of David Ribes
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4b. Coordination challenges

• Dispersed teams perform poorly relative to
  collocated teams
• Performance suffers due to coordination overhead
• More successful dispersed teams adopt explicit
  coordination mechanisms

The ideas on this slide are from an NSF report by
Cummings and Kiesler (2003), available
at http//netvis.mit.edu/papers/NSF_KDI_report.pd
f
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Face-to-face meetings (n27)

• Community workshop, November 2000
• NEESgrid site review, December 2000
• NEESgrid site review, March 2001
• NEESgrid kickoff, August 2001
• Awardees meeting, September 2001
• NEES gap meeting, November 2001
• Awardees meeting, December 2001
• NEESgrid site review, March 2002
• NEES national meeting, June 2002
• NEESgrid all hands meeting, August 2002
• UR workshop, October 2002
• Awardees meeting, November 200
• NEESgrid site review, March 2003
• NEES national meeting, May 2003
• Awardees meeting, May 2003
• NEES summit meeting, July 2003
• NEES data workshop, July 2003

• Awardees meeting, September 2003
• NEES data meeting, November 2003
• NEESgrid all hands meeting, November 2003
• NEESgrid site review, January 2004
• NEESgrid integration week, February 2004
• NEES transition meeting, March 2004
• Awardees meeting, March 2004
• NEES national meeting, May 2004
• NEESgrid integration week, July 2004
• 13th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering,
  August 2004

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Coordination by travel
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Use of H.323 videoconferencing
NSF LAN meetings
b
c
d
a
UNR Demo
a initial ES-TF meeting b ES-TF meeting time
changed c succession to new ES-TF chair d
change to biweekly ES-TF meetings
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5. Summary

• Shared space is not a viable solution for most
  interdisciplinary collaborators
• Effective use of video and display technology can
  approximate the benefits of shared space (e.g.,
  ultra-resolution collaboration environments)
• Understanding socio-technical issues in long
  distance collaboration can help avoid
  difficulties
• Appreciate and respond to differences in
  professional or disciplinary cultures
• Develop strategies to accommodate the increased
  overhead associated with long distance
  collaboration

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Useful URLs

• On videoconferencing etiquette
• http//www.videnet.gatech.edu/cookbook.en/list_top
  ics.php?topic6sequence0nameBestPracticesand
  Etiquette
• On audio conferencing etiquette
• http//cw.conferencing.com/service/ACtips.htm
• On data conferencing etiquette
• http//www.helpmeeting.com/conf_tips.htm