Defense committee: Dr. Nevill-Manning (chair/CS), Dr. Stone (CS), Dr. Pavlovic (CS), Dr. Marsic (ECE), and Dr. Tremaine (IS, NJIT).

Abstract:

In my dissertation I explore the hypothesis that view/display differences in collaboration platforms may affect the collaboration relationships among the communicating peers and, therefore, groupware applications running with heterogeneous views and displays have to be designed in close connection with the information needs of particular users in specific collaboration tasks. I present the design and implementation of a framework for implementation of adaptive collaborative applications that run on heterogeneous platforms. It demonstrates a general way to adapt applications across multiple heterogeneous platforms. A set of heterogeneous groupware (teamwork) and human-computer interaction studies was designed for investigating heterogeneity effects and applied in four successive studies. The studies presented here are quite novel. No previous research has done similar extensive studies on heterogeneity of collaboration like the ones presented here. The experimental results show that the collaboration across heterogeneous platforms is affected by the differences imposed by the platform limitations. The usual set of awareness widgets is insufficient to support collaboration on heterogeneous platforms. Display, representation, input device, and bandwidth differences need not be a deficit in the collaboration and that they can, under the right circumstances be an advantage. The experimental results, design guidelines, learned lessons, and tools presented have applicability in mobile computing. Mobile applications involving synchronous collaboration are emerging in many fields, such as: military services, healthcare, business, transportation, or game industry.