Supporting Collaborative Work: A Tale of Two Projects

February 18, 2010
Eleni Stroulia | University of Alberta

A substantial amount of work today is accomplished through collaborative activities, which may be open-ended and opportunistic or structured and well defined, with participants with similar skills and knowledge or from different disciplines. Our group has been investigating, and developing tools to support, several different scenarios of collaborative work. On one end of the spectrum, we have developed WikiDev2.0, a tool that supports the work of software- development teams by integrating information about relevant software artifacts on a wiki-based platform. On the other end, we have developed MERITS, a virtual-world platform that enables interdisciplinary health-sciences teams to practice (through simulation) their collaborative tasks. In this presentation, I will discuss the two projects and I will draw some general lessons from our experience.

Speaker Details

Eleni Stroulia is a Professor and NSERC/iCORE (w. support from IBM) Industrial Research Chair on Service Systems Management with the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta. She holds M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research addresses industrially relevant software-engineering problems with automated methods, based on artificial-intelligence techniques. Her team has produced automated methods for migrating legacy interfaces to web-based front ends, and for analyzing and supporting the design evolution of object-oriented software. More recently, she has been working on the development, composition, run- time monitoring and adaptation of service-oriented applications, and on examining the role of web 2.0 tools and virtual worlds in offering innovative health-care services.