SZTAKI - Department of Distributed Systems

Project objectives

This research and development project aims at implementing a new platform for supporting collaboration within organizations, companies and consortiums having separate internal work culture and infrastructure. The platform fulfills its tasks by providing web-based and other (multimodal) interfaces adapting to the existing software and data-handling infrastructure of cooperating partners for the whole life-cycle of a project.

The project plans - following the principles of distributed systems - to achieve a new kind of collaborative distributed knowledge & project management system and metholodogy. Applying research results of information technology and management we are implementing a new kind of groupware-system. Stress is put on developing models and software tools for project evaluation.

The protocol applied by the consortium members (participants) makes it possible for all of them to follow the actual state and the development of the running projects in a multimodal and portal environment . The participants applying predefined methods for the project ecexution (in the pilot application these methods are adapting to the typical rules, methodology and metrology of collaboration during tenders) might use their own existing software tools to execute and monitor the running project.
Beside the manual interactions based on the indicator values (e.g. in case of resource shortage additional resources must be allocated) automatic processes might be executed, too.

Proactivity

Proactivity in PROMOCIO means, that if needed, the system can automatically generate new events based on the continuously monitored indicators, and the divergence of them from their normal state, applying previously determined evaluation methodology (e.g. sends notifications, initiates subprocesses, denies access, etc.) to push the indicators to their normal range.
The monitored indicators can also be used to notify the participants about the actual state of the project in written or even in “spoken” way. A specific feature of the system is that, when it needed it can provide information in an accurate and semi-automatic way to outsiders (public) about the running projects.
This concept introduces the results of the control theory of classical feedback systems into the methodology of groupware systems. This combination results in a new human-machine-human group activity and supporting software system (this is a novelty of this project).

Multimodality

The proposed groupware system is expected to be used by managers, executives, technicians, etc. While the use of computers for them is natural, they quite often use other tools, like cell-phones, notebooks, PDAs (e.g. during travels), too. In these cases the support of project-like cooperation must be extended to these “non classical” input-output devices, and they must be integrated into the management system. For example, when a project participant who should get a notification is sitting in a car, the system might choose automatically to convert the message into audio message (modality change), and pass it to the cell-phone of the participant. These modality changes can be based on the monitored indicators in the system. This novel type of the groupware systems and the potential user interest both lead us to put extra stress on the integration of multimodal user interfaces (image, text and audio interfaces) and tools (e.g. mobile tools).