2^nd Workshop on Adaptive Collaboration Support

The workshop will be organized as follows (the time schedule is at the end of this page):

Panel discussion

Title: "Adaptively Supporting Collaboration: Dimensions and Challenges"

Summary: The workshop will commence with a panel discussion which will address the questions of whether and in what situations it may be desirable to adaptively support collaboration processes. The discussion will focus on the different dimensions of collaboration and the challenges lying therein, when collaboration takes place online. The invited panelists' work has addressed adaptivity and online collaboration from several complementary perspectives, which we hope will make for lively discussion and an excellent introduction to the workshop's working sessions.

Invited panelists (not confirmed yet):

• Susan Bull, University of Birmingham, UK
• Styliani Kleanthous, University of Leeds, UK
• Estefanía Martín Barroso, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
• Liana Razmerita, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
• Jie Zhang, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Working sessions

Title: "Adaptive Collaboration Support: Whence and Whither?"

Summary: Irrespectively of the application domains in which collaboration is examined and the provision of adaptive support is attempted, the main questions remain the same: How can groups (of various sizes, levels of connectivity, goals, etc.) and their activities (all the way from free-form to fully-structured) be modeled? How can we monitor, analyze and interpret the interconnected activities of individuals, as well the behavior of groups as wholes, to establish the need of, and appropriate ways for intervention? What types of intervention are possible, and what are their potential effects? How can we best support group formation, scaffolding, communication, organization, joint artifact creation, etc.? The working sessions will be structured around central themes taken from these questions, and decided during the workshop itself.

Process: Following the conclusion of the discussion panel, workshop participants will be presented with a set of potential working topics relating to the preceding questions, and will be invited to specialize and add to the set. Subsequently, participants will be asked to form groups that will undertake discussion of one or more of he selected topics; group number and synthesis will apparently depend on the number and interests of participants. Each group's task will be to point out relevant existing work (coming also possibly from other fields) and the main short- and medium- tem research challenges in the respective area.

Expected outcomes: Each group will produce a prioritized set of research challenges to be addressed by future work in the area of Adaptive Collaboration Support. Ideally, these challenges will be interlinked to each other, where semantic connections exist, or progress is interdependent.

Final plenary session

The workshop will culminate in a final plenary session, where the working groups will present and motivate the selected challenges. These will be summarized and organized in a mind-map by the workshop organizers during the short presentations. Participants will then be asked to further discuss and vote on the significance of challenges and on the immediacy of research attention they require.

The process is hoped to result in a preliminary research agenda that will offer (at least partial) guidance and inspiration to researchers in the area. The agenda will be published online at the workshop's site. Furthermore, presuming a sufficient quality and coverage of the results, and interest on the part of workshop participants, further opportunities for publishing an elaborated and enriched version of the research agenda in an appropriate venue will be investigated.

Workshop schedule

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