Posts filed under 'Organizational News'
As we move into year 4 of the NECTAR program, it is with regret that we announce the resignation of NECTAR researcher Sriram Subramanian, Assistant Professor at the University of Saskatchewan. Since joining the team in 2005, Sri has been a key contributor and played an important role in the success of the program. His work with colleagues and guidance of students has been greatly valued and will be missed. To ensure the momentum of his hard work continues, Professor Carl Gutwin has agreed to take on the management of his students and related projects. Sriram will be moving on to Philips Research Eindhoven, The Netherlands performing research in the area of Media Interaction with particular focus on multi-touch tables and transparent wall displays. Thanks to Sriram for all his hard work and contributions; we wish him all the best in his future endeavors.
February 8th, 2007
In 2006, NECTAR welcomed C. Ian Kyer as chair to the NECTAR Board of Directors (see June 19 posting under “People Happenings”).
C. Ian Kyer combines an abiding interest in history with an active legal practice in IT Law. He is a graduate of both the University of Waterloo (BA 1972, MA 1973) and the University of Toronto (PhD in Medieval History 1979, LLB 1980). Ian’s legal practice focuses on the various IT industries. He acts for both IT companies, helping them protect their intellectual property and to license it to others, and for those acquiring IT services, dealing with software development, outsourcing, e-commerce, website development and a host of other IT services.
Ian, who is a senior partner of Fasken Martineau, was a pioneer in Canadian IT Law, starting to work in this area in 1982. He was only the second non-USA lawyer to be elected President of the Computer Law Association (now iTechLaw) in 1994. He was a founder of the International Federation of Computer Law Associations in Amsterdam in 1988 and the founder and first President of the Canadian IT Law Association in 1997. He is listed in Best of the Best, outlining the top 25 IT lawyers in the World, as well as in the Top 500 Lawyers in Canada, Chamber’s listing of the world’s best lawyers, and in the 2006 inaugural issue of The Best Lawyers in Canada.
In his spare time Ian continues to read and write history. He is the author of The Fiercest Debate about the history of legal education in Ontario and a frequent contributor of articles to the Osgoode Society’s Essays in the History of Canadian Law and to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. He is working on a history of his law firm, Fasken Martineau.
Those attending the NECTAR AGM in November (9th and 10th) will have a chance to meet Ian and other NECTAR Board members then.
July 13th, 2006
NECTAR has recently welcomed a new chair to the NECTAR Board of Directors. C. Ian Kyer of Fasken Martineau assumed the role of Chair at the close of the Board meeting on March 16, 2006. A further news posting will provide more details.
Other members of the Board include Pavel Curtis (Microsoft), David Martin (SMART), Doug Hull (Connectivity Partners), Vic DiCiccio (University of Waterloo), Ron Baecker (Principal Investigator of NECTAR) and Kellogg Booth (Associate Director of NECTAR). Board meeting are also attended by NSERC Account Manager Jack Deyirmendjian and Network Manager of NECTAR, Sara Frank Bristow.
June 19th, 2006
NECTAR owes a debt of gratitude to the Inaugural Chair of the NECTAR Board of Directors, Lionel Tolan of Simon Fraser University, who guided us through our first two years of research and administration.
The NECTAR Board is responsible for the management, direction and financial accountability of the network. As Chair, Lionel presided over meetings in December 2004, March 2005, December 2005 and March 2006. His counsel and guidance in NECTAR’s first two years have been invaluable. He will continue as a member of the NECTAR Board through 2008.
Lionel Tolan has been Director of Academic Computing Services at Simon Fraser University since 1991. He has worked at SFU since May 1970 in a variety of capacities, including Advisory Consultant of Distributed Systems (1982 to 1991) and Computer Operations Specialist (1970 to 1982).
Lionel is Chair of Board of Directors of the BCNET Identity Management Working Group, and Chair of the British Columbia Optical Internet Consortium. He is also a member of the University Executive Forum (sponsored by Apple).
For those curious about the Board’s role in NECTAR, here is an abbreviated timeline of its activities over past two years:
- December 21, 2004: Inaugural meeting of the Board. Its role was clarified, and reporting requirements specified by NSERC. The NECTAR IP Framework was reviewed and budgets for 2005 were approved.
- March 8, 2005: Consolidated Financial reports for 2004 (and full funding for 2005) were approved.
- December 2, 2005: The Board reviewed research and financials through September 2005. A Finance Subcommittee was established to review and correct deficiencies in financial reporting. Additional research reporting requirements were specified by NSERC.
- February 15, 2006: The Finance Subcommittee discussed fiscal reporting challenges faced (and solutions proposed).
- March 16, 2006: Outcomes of the Finance Subcommittee meeting were reviewed and approved. Strategies for better fiscal reporting were put in place. Consolidated Financial reports for 2005 (and full funding for 2006) were approved.
June 19th, 2006
The ACM CSCW Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work is the premiere conference for Collaborative Technologies, clearly matching the theme of NECTAR. NECTAR members are contributing greatly to this conference, which in turns indicates the influential role Canada and its Nectar researchers play in this discipline. Some highlights include:
- David Martin, Co-Founder, Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer of SMART Technologies, is co-Chair of the conference
- Saul Greenberg, U Calgary, is one of the two Papers Chairs
- Kori Inkpen, Dalhousie, is one of the two Notes Chairs
- Sheelagh Carpendale, U Calgary, is the Videos Chair
- Carl Gutwin, U Saskatchewan, is one of the two Doctoral Colloquium Chairs and an Associate Chair of the Program Committee
- Jeremy Brinholtz, U Toronto and the NECTAR Social Science Postdoc, is one of the two Student Volunteer Chairs
- Gerald Morrison, Smart Technologies, is the Computing Chair and the Audio Visual Chair
- Cory Sanoy, Smart Technologies, is one of the Demonstrations Chair
- Shannon Goodman, Smart Technologies, is the Local Arrangements Chair
- Lyn Bartram, SFU and our former Network Manager, is one of the Workshop Chairs and is the Immigration Chair
Of course, one of the great things about the ACM CSCW Conference is that it will be held in Banff, Alberta CANADA.!
For more information
February 9th, 2006
Saul Greenberg.
A graduate course on Computer Supported Cooperative Work at Calgary (and a parallel one at University of Toronto) is now in progress. Almost all presentations are available to nectar members as:
webcast and archived lectures via epresence
key readings describing intellectual foundations.
presentation deck provided by students.
Both Calgary and U Toronto offers two different (but overlapping) introductions to CSCW. At this point in time, the topics in Calgary have or will cover the following material (other items will be added later):
CSCW - An Introduction
Conversation: Behavioral Foundations
Video-Mediated Communication
Thinking about Groups and Organizations
The SDG Toolkit
Casual Interaction: Behavioral Foundations
Casual Interaction: Media Spaces
Shared Workspaces: Behavioural Foundations
.Networking and the Collabrary
Bulding Media Items in the Community Bar
Shared Workspaces: Awareness
Shared Workspaces: Tabletops and Large Displays
Asynchronous use of Large Displays
Shared Screens and Windows
Blogs
For more information
- Key Readings contain 2-3 essential readings and 1-3 optional readings for each topic, as well as pointers to the powerpoint slide deck used in the epresence lectures
- EPresence lectures are located in the Calgary folder at this web site.
- Contact Saul Greenberg, saul.greenberg at ucalgary.ca
October 27th, 2005
The first class of Ron Baecker’s NECTAR-sponsored CSCW course will begin Sept 13, 2005 at 2 p.m. Toronto time (ET). The class will be taught and attended collaboratively using ePresence Interactive Media from the University of Toronto. Feel free to join in!
Further Information
- Information about the class may be obtained here .
- The URL that remote users can use to access the class is here. Please plan to log in around 1.45 ET.
Even if you have used ePresence before, please perform the following checks BEFORE logging into the webcast (the headset and microphone will allow use to ask voice questions or comment during discussion periods):
September 12th, 2005
NECTAR is a network of Canada’s leading researchers in human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Our 13 participants come from 6 universities and are world-class experts in these two fields. NECTAR is funded by CDN 4.4M from Canada’s NSERC Research Council, and 1.1M from Industry.
Extract from Grant Executive Summary
The Internet has long provided a network infrastructure for collaboration technologies (often called groupware) that support how people communicate and work together. The recent availability of broadband Internet connections in offices, schools, and homes has led to a huge increase in commercial groupware systems development. Many more innovative and relevant new technologies are just around the corner: displays that cover tabletops or entire walls, high-precision sensing equipment that tracks movement, and interconnections of dozens or hundreds of mobile computing devices.
Even though many of these technologies are already available commercially, or are at the very least advanced research prototypes, there are serious problems when they are used to support real group work. Today’s groupware is extremely awkward and inefficient when compared with face-to-face interaction. Collaboration technologies typically fail because they do not support the complex and subtle actions and interactions that make group work simple and natural in the real world.
For this reason, groupware to date has only a few success stories (e.g., organizational memories such as Lotus Notes, instant messaging, multiplayer games). While often quite crude, these technologies succeed because they make collaboration possible where it was previously impossible. Yet if the full potential of current collaborative technology is to be realized, and if we are to capitalize on innovations to come, researchers must find ways to make all computer-supported collaboration more efficient, productive, and natural.
The Research
We are concentrating our efforts on collaboration as themes centered around three organizational settings: the Commons, the Workroom, and the Presentation Room. These three settings are settings in the abstract – not real physical places, but conceptual ones inspired by the physical spaces that groups use in real face-to-face organizations. They capture the essence of three kinds of collaboration, regardless of where a group actually carries out its activities (in our research people may be anywhere). The settings serve as unifying concepts that both drive and tie together our research efforts.
Vision
to investigate technological and social issues that will make computer-supported collaboration more efficient, more productive, and more natural.
Goals
To reduce collaboration effort and improve collaboration efficiency in computer-supported cooperative work, based on an understanding of how groups of people really work together;
To maximize the potential of next-generation interactive technologies for collaborative work;
To make collaboration at a distance as productive and efficient as working face-to-face, where possible;
To develop computer-assisted collaboration technologies that augment and surpass traditional ways of working together.
Expected Results
We will develop innovative techniques and products:
design-oriented analyses of what people do and need in various organizational settings,
new groupware metaphors, tools and techniques to make collaboration more efficient and productive;
infrastructure (algorithms and architectures) to allow us to rapidly transform ideas into systems,
validation and iterative improvement of our innovations by testing whether people can collaborate effectively in realistic situations using collaboration technologies we develop,
dissemination of our results and technology transfer to appropriate organizations.
June 1st, 2005