EWall - Electronic Card Wall: Computational Support for Decision-Making in Collaborative Environments
Abstract
Our work focused on conceiving and prototyping technologies for supporting individual and collaborative sense-making activities in distributed and decentralized work environments. We developed an experimental computational environment referred to as the EWall system. The EWall system is designed to be used for users to conduct, for researchers to investigate, and for computational systems to support individual and collaborative sense-making activities. The EWall system engages users in the visual organization of information through the spatial arrangement and modification of graphical objects. Computational agents infer from spatial information arrangements and the collaborative use of information as a basis for directing the flow of information among collaborating users and computational systems. The goal of the agents is to direct the distribution of information in ways that bring together people with complimentary backgrounds, expertise, interests and objectives and that improves team shared understanding. Individual agents represent unique cognitive and collaborative concepts, combine their analyses, and autonomously adapt to particular users, tasks and circumstances. The primary contribution of this work lies in the design of concepts and mechanics that enable a noninterruptive interchange of contextual discoveries between humans and computational systems.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 17, 2007
- Accession Number
- ADA475014
Entities
People
- Patrick Winston
- Paul Keel
- William L. Porter
Organizations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology