The Tenth International Workshop on Collaborative Editing Systems

(IWCES 2008)

ACM CSCW 2008, San Diego, California, USA

November 8, 2008

URL: http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/ashfshen/iwces10/


Workshop Program

Theme

In the past years, a number of Collaborative Editing Systems (CES) have been developed to support a group of people editing a shared document collaboratively over a computer network. The major benefits of collaborative editing include reduced task completion time by taking advantage of parallelism and improved solution quality by integrating collective wisdom. These systems have been used as an effective model and vehicle to study various technical as well as social issues.

Collaborative editing is faced with a set of social issues that support and improve the team work. For example, various communication tools such as instant messengers, share whiteboards, and Web/Audio/Video conferences, can be used to help people working together in real-time over an interactive workspace. Flexibility should be offered to support different forms of collaborative activities such as melding of synchronous and asynchronous work. The impact of organizational roles (may cross different communities) on the participants in editing is another social challenge for group editors.

Technical issues, such as concurrency control, have also been addressed in other fields such as databases and distributed systems. However, unlike most distributed applications, a CES demands that we consider the role of the human when selecting the concurrency control schemes. Consequently, classical
approaches cannot be applied outright to CES due to their effect on the user interface. The novel techniques proposed for CES, such as operational transformation, multi-versioning, optional locking, group undo, can bring new insights into the design of other multi-user applications including Internet-based multi-player games, collaborative virtual environments, and mobile computing. Other issues critical for the design of CES include group undo, group awareness, interaction control, access control, security, usability, and so on. Accompanying the CES research and technological progress in the past decade, a range of novel collaborative editing applications are emerging and making impact on industries and end-users, including  collaborative office productivity tools, collaborative digital media design tools, collaborative software engineering tools, and collaborative editing applications based on emerging Web technologies such as Ajax, Web service etc.

This workshop builds on the success of previous workshops at Group'99, CSCW'00, Group'01, CSCW'02, ECSCW'03, CSCW'04, GROUP'05, CSCW'06, and GROUP'07. The main focus has been adjusted every year according to the organizers' understanding of research progress and trends in the community. The main focus of the Group'99 workshop was consistency maintenance algorithms. The CSCW'00 workshop included more issues of usability. The Group'01 workshop focused on the people and organizational issues in developing collaborative documents. The CSCW'02 workshop concentrated on usage scenarios of collaborative editing. The main topic of the ECSCW'03 workshop was the integration of collaborative editors into general information or application infrastructure. The focus of the CSCW'04 workshop was the enhancement of familiar existing single-user systems with collaborative editing techniques. The objective of the GROUP'05 workshop was to apply/expand collaborative editing technologies to broader areas/applications. The CSCW'06 workshop focused on how to model operation intentions and maintain semantic consistency in the context of specific group writing tasks. The focus of the GROUP'07 workshop was on Web-based collaborative editing technologies and applications. This year's workshop will focus on novel collaborative editing applications (e.g., collaborative editing applications based on emerging Web technologies, collaborative digital media design tools, collaborative office productivity tools, or collaborative software engineering tools), application-inspired collaborative editing technology research, and social impacts of collaborative editing applications.

Topics

We invite submissions addressing issues related to any topics of collaborative editing (systems). Interesting topics include but are not limited to the following:

Participation

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from various backgrounds having interest in collaborative editing. We invite contributions from experts in the area of distributed computing, information systems, human-computer interaction, and social science. Furthermore, we also encourage participation from users who are in need of large systems offering facilities for collaborative editing to discuss their requirements. While each participant is encouraged to submit a paper, other participants will be accepted on a space available basis.

Participants should submit a 4 to 6 page working paper pertaining to their research area for presentation and discussion during the workshop. Papers should be formatted using the standard ACM SIGCHI format and should include an abstract of no more than 150 words. Accepted papers will be published in a special issue of Collaborative Computing in IEEE Distributed Systems Online. All submissions should be sent to Dr. Haifeng Shen at ashfshen@ntu.edu.sg.

Important Dates

Web References

Organizers

Dr. David Chen is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Information & Communication Technology, Griffith University. He obtained his Ph.D. from the same university. He has been conducting research in the area of CSCW, particularly in collaborative editing systems, for more than 7 years, and being involved in the design and development of REDUCE and GRACE collaborative editing systems.

Dr. Clarence (Skip) A. Ellis is Professor of Computer Science and Co-Director of the Collaboration Technology Research Group at the University of Colorado. At Colorado, he is a member of the Systems Software Lab, and the Institute for Cognitive Science. He is involved in research and teaching of groupware, coordination theory, and operating systems. Dr. Ellis has worked as a researcher and developer at MCC, Xerox PARC, Bull Corp, Bell Telephone Labs, IBM, Los Alamos Scientific Labs, and Argonne National Lab. His academic experience includes teaching at Stanford University, MIT, University of Texas, Stevens Institute of Technology, and at Chiaotung University in China under an AFIPS overseas teaching fellowship.

Prof. Ning Gu is the Director of Cooperative Information and Systems Laboratory in the School of Information Science and Engineering, Fudan University, China.

Claudia-Lavinia IGNAT is a researcher at INRIA Nancy-Grand Est in France. She received her Ph.D. degree in 2006 from the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Her research area is collaborative editing with a focus on consistency maintenance over different types of documents such as textual, graphical and XML documents as well as awareness approaches in collaborative environments

Du Li is a member of research staff at Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, California. Before he joined Nokia, he received PhD from UCLA in 2000 and had been in academia for seven years. His research interests include mobile computing, Web 2.0, collaborative systems, and computer supported cooperative work.

Dr. Pascal Molli is an Associate Professor at University of Nancy, France. He is working within the INRIA Project ECOO that stands for Environment and COOperation. He is working on collaborative editing systems and optimistic replication systems.

Dr. Gérald Oster is an Associate Professor at University of Nancy, France. He received his Ph.D. degree in 2005 from the Department of Computer Science at Nancy-University, France and he was a postdoctoral researcher for one year at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. His domain of research is optimistic replication with a particular focus on collaborative editing systems.

Prof. Moira Norrie is Head of the Institute of Information Systems at ETH Zurich. Her research group Global Information Systems (GlobIS) are developing new methods, tools and platforms for collaborative information environments. These include advanced database technologies with integrated support for personalised and context-dependent information delivery, a framework for mixed-media information and customisable collaborative editors. Paper is a pervasive medium that receives special attention in many of her projects as her group seeks to provide it equal footing with digital media in the modern world of hyperlinked information spaces.

Dr. Haifeng Shen is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His major research focuses are on Human Computer Interaction and Collaboration, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Web Computing, Distributed Systems, Software Engineering, Collaborative Virtual Environments, and Information Systems since his PhD study at Griffith University, Australia.

Dr. Chengzheng Sun is a Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Before he moved to Singapore, he was a Professor at Griffith University, Australia. Previously, he worked in Changsha Institute of Technology, University of Amsterdam, Phillips Research Labs Eindhoven, and ACE in Amsterdam, for over 15 years in the areas of distributed and parallel computing systems. His current research lies at the intersections of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, distributed systems, human-computer interaction, and software engineering. Major applications of his research include collaborative office productivity tools, collaborative computer-aided design and engineering tools, and collaborative virtual environments. Dr. Sun is the leader and chief investigator of REDUCE, CoWord and CoPowerPoint projects.