YEAR 3 ACCOMPLISHMENTS -- C/C

Support Team

The Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC) at Syracuse
University provides most of the team that supports the Collaboration
and Communications infrastructure area.  The Syracuse team is lead by
NPAC's Director, Prof. Geoffrey C. Fox, and draws as necessary on the
wide range of C/C-related capabilities represented by the Center's
research staff and students.  Principal contributions to the suport
effort during Year 3 came from Dr David Bernholdt, the Tango
Interactive Collaboratory Group headed by Dr Marek Podgorny, and
Yuping Zhu, drawing on her background in web-linked databases and
intranets. Day-to-day C/C operations, such as the PET web site and the
Tango Interactive server are handled by Nichols Research on-site staff
members Herman Moore and John Eberle, respectively.  


Year 3 Effort

NPAC's efforts in this area encompass not just Collaboration and
Communication per se, but also the closely related area of tools and
technologies for training and education.  The NPAC team is also
involved in analagous support activities in the ARL MSRC and ASC MSRC
PET programs, as well as having a modest involvement in distance
training and education activities in conjunction with the NAVO MSRC
PET program.  These additional connections provide a great deal of
synergy with CEWES-sponsored C/C activities.

The focus of our work has been understanding the needs and
requirements for "collaboration and training" tools in the context of
PET activities, and to work towards their deployment.  In this sense,
we are strongly involved with both the rest of the PET team and the
MSRC's user community.  At CEWES, our work has focused primarily on
support for electronic training, and expecially on synchronous tools
for collaboration and training -- support for "live" two-way
interactions over the network.  When combined with our activities for
the other PET programs, this work becomes part of a unified whole,
covering both synchronous and asynchronous tools for information
dissemination, collaboration, and training.

During Years 2 and 3, NPAC has worked extensively with PET partner
Jackson State University (JSU) on some experiments in network-based
distance education.  Using NPAC's Tango Interactive collaboratory
framework, a series of semester-length academic credit courses have
been taught by Syracuse-based instructors to students at JSU.  The
experience gained from these efforts has been critical in
understanding both the technical and sociological factors surrounding
distance education.

Tango Interactive is a framework that allows sharing of applications
acrodd the Internet.  It includes a suite of tools useful for basic
collaboration and distance learning activities: shared web browser,
chat, whiteboard, audio/video conferencing, shared text editor, etc.
It also provides an application program interface (API) that allows
other applications to be hooked into the Tango framework.

Tools of this sort are relatively new, and even the most
computer-savvy have little or no experience with them as yet.
Consequently it became clear rather early on that for these tools to
gain acceptance in either collaborative or educational applications,
they must be deployed in a staged fashion, starting from
well-structured environments (i.e. classroom style educational use)
and working towards less structures environments (i.e. general
research collaboration).

During Year 3, NPAC collaborated with the Ohio Supercomputer Center
(OSC), another PET partner, to transition the tools and experience
from the JSU education efforts into the PET training arena.  OSC
provided instructors and course content, while NPAC worked with OSC,
CEWES, and other recipient centers to provide support for the delivery
tools (Tango Interactive). This effort expanded our experience to
include instructors previously unfamiliar with the delivery tools, and
while retaining the structured instructor/student relationship, the
compressed delivery (over a few days rather than many weeks)
introduced additional requirements on the robustness of the system.

This highly successful effort has lead the way to what will become
widespread and fairly routine use of distance training across the PET
program in the coming year.  It has also lead to an increased interest
in the use of the Tango collaboratory in less structured environments,
such as some kinds of meetings and research collaborations.  This has
given us a number of exploratory groups to work with as we begin the
staged deployment of network collaboration tools into these
progressively less structured situations.

This and other work at CEWES, combined with related activities at the
other Centers in the collaboration and training area have lead us to
develop an integrated picture of the current state of the art in both
synchronous and asynchronous collaboration technology and how we
believe they can be used effectively within the context of the PET
program.  A white paper outlining this strategy will appear in the
Preprint Archives.