Recent Progress in Group Editors and Operational Transformation Algorithms

January 27, 2005
Du Li | Texas A&M University

Group editors are a classic example of Internet-based productivity applications. They allow a group of distributed human users to edit a shared multimedia document over a computer network. Consistency control in this environment must not only guarantee convergence of replicated data but also attempt to preserve user intentions. Operational transformation (OT) is a well-established method for optimistic consistency control in this context and has drawn continuing research attention since 1989.

It is promising in fulfilling the speaker’s longer-term vision of implementing group editors as a reliable and flexible collaboration medium. This talk interprets the rationales behind group editors and OT, overviews OT-related consistency models and algorithms, and presents some of the latest progress made on this topic by the speaker and his students at Texas A&M University.

Speaker Details

Dr. Du Li has been an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University since 2000. He received a Ph.D. degree from UCLA in 2000 and a NSF CAREER award in 2002. His research interests include Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Distributed Systems, Middleware, Intelligent User Interfaces, and End-User Programming. More information is available at http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/lidu/.