BOG2
Communication and Collaboration

BOG2 Themes and Issues

Communciation and Collaboaration

Patty Jones and Simon Kasif

January 9, 1997



This Break-Out Group will focus on issues
related to communication and collaboration
among multiple agents (both humans and intelligent
agent technologies). We loosely distinguish between
communication and collaboration in the following way:
communication refers to processes through which actors
interact with other actors; actors direct talk or action
to others, possibly over time and space.
Collaboration refers to joint work toward shared goal(s).
Communication is a necessary prerequisite for collaboration,
but not all communication is in the context of collaboration.

In the context of a human-centered approach to this question,
we focus on several critical themes:

* what makes human-human communication natural
and effective, and how can we facilitate those
processes with information and computing technology?
A common assumption is that face-to-face communication
is the most natural and rich (and by implication,
the "best" means of communication); however, advanced
technologies such as computer aids, software
agents and distributed databases create
opportunities for communicative processes that differ
substantially from face-to-face interaction.

An important point is that there is not "one best way" of
collaborating and communicating; rather, depending on the
context of group practice (e.g., the nature of the joint
problem solving tasks, the existence of various social
norms, etc.), different media and technologies
are appropriated in different ways. And over time,
groups adapt technologies to suit their needs and in
turn are influenced by the possibilities built into technologies.

* Three possible foci for discussion are three aspects of
cooperative work:

	creation and maintenance of a shared information space
	articulation work (coordinated activity to allocate tasks
		and redirect attention)
	impression management (the work that people do to create
		particular impressions of themselves for others' benefit)

* What are the processes of attention, inference, and performance
that gives rise to communicative and collaborative practice? How
can we model and how can we use to inform the design of communication
and collaboration technologies?

(From Bond & Gasser, 1988):
* How do we formulate, describe, decompose, and allocate
problems and synthesize results among a group of problem
solvers?

* What are properties of language and interaction protocols
that facilitate 'good' communication?

* How can we ensure that agents act coherently? How to define
coherence?

* How do we study and model mutual knowledge, intention
ascription of others (that is, one agent makes inferences
about others' goals, plans, knowledge, etc).

* How do we study and model the reconciliation of disparate
viewpoints?




A variety of more specific technological issues are also relevant, including:

* Human-centered approaches to conflict management

* Building more natural and effective immersive multimodal
collaborative virtual environments (e.g., the CAVE)

* Distributed databases

* Concurrency control

* Schema evolution

* Mechanisms and architectures for sharing data and knowledge



A sampling of methodological topics for discussion:

* how to measure quality of communicative practices

* how to study the negotation of meaning and development of norms

* how to study the emergence of related phenomena
called "common ground", "shared understanding", "mutual
assimilation of knowledge"...this includes shared knowledge
of the situation, distributed collaborative planning

* Distributed artificial intelligent/multi-agent system
simulations of group and organizational practice as testbeds
for hypothesis generation and testing