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Subject:
From:
Helen Wilson <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Helen Wilson <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 24 Mar 1997 11:18:13 +0100
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THE INDUSTRIAL SUMMER SCHOOL
ON
HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN
OF ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY SYSTEMS

organized by
The European Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Engineering (EURISCO)
in cooperation with
The Special Interest Group for Human-Computer Interaction
of the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM SIGCHI)
and
The Groupement d'Interet Scientifique « Sciences de la Cognition » (GIS)

to be held in
Saint-Lary, Pyrénées, France
August 25-29, 1997

PURPOSE
The purpose of the Human-Centered Design of Organizational Memory Systems
is to enable the participants to define the requirements for human-centered
organizational memory design for concrete application. This will be
achieved by teaching the basic concepts and methods for human-centered
organizational memory design through a five-day industrial summer school
using a mixture of tutorials, lectures, and group exercises.

BACKGROUND
The evolution of our societies (e.g., speed of technological changes,
people turnover, jobs evolution) and the emergence of information
technology stress the need for a better definition of organizational memory
(Intranet) concepts. One purpose of organizational memory design is to make
employees' work easier, but if it is applied without due consideration of
its effects, the organizational memory may not be accepted and actually
used. There is therefore a need for concepts and methods that can support
human-centered organizational memory design, i.e., the use of concepts and
methods for taking into account human factors in computing systems applied
to organizational environments.

COURSE CONTENT
The course will last five days, and cover the following topics: design
rationale (design history as a form of documentation and project
management), information exchange standards (interoperability), evaluation
of group communication (mutual understanding and organizational learning),
technological support (hypertext, authoring and cooperative-work tools),
and human and machine adaptability (human-centered automation, contextual
support and agent technology). For each topic, the course will present the
main theories and methods, supported by an illustrative set of examples.

WHO SHOULD PARTICIPATE
This course is aimed at professionals from industry and academia
who-directly or as supervisors-analyze, design, implement or evaluate
systems involving humans and organizational memory tools. This includes
system designers, system analysts, technical managers, design team leaders,
cognitive engineers, psychologists, work sociologists, documentalists, etc.
The participants should have some experience with project management,
documentation systems, decision making, complex systems design, and team
work.

LECTURE 1: The Definition and Use of Organizational Memory Systems
Mike Atwood and Beatrix Zimmerman

This lecture will begin by defining a conceptual framework for
organizational memory. We review current literature and then focus on
systems which support organizational memory. We discuss existing systems
which support organizational memory such as design rationale, coordination
theory, performance support systems, electronic mail systems, information
stores, and group memories. We then expand on group memories. Group
memories are intended to overcome the symmetry of ignorance (Rittel; 1984)
and to help a group of people who work together to manage large amounts of
information relevant to group activities, record decisions and the
rationale for decisions and help to focus different perspectives on a
common problem. We conclude by outlining the Group Interactive Memory
Management system (GIMMe) which is an example of a group memory system
which can be used in the seeding and growing of an organizational memory.

LECTURE 2: CSCW, Groupware, and Workflow Systems
Jonathan Grudin

CSCW and Groupware have drawn from research and systems development
traditions that were largely independent, and to understand the different
contributions of each requires that we understand the overall context. This
overview lecture outlines the history and key conceptual contributions of
various contributing disciplines. Participants receive a useful index to the
published research literature and guidance in understanding that
literature. Groupware ranges from shrinkwrap applications to in-house
systems, from small-group support using computer-mediated communication to
large-group support through workflow management. Different emphases in
Europe, North America, and Japan are discussed. The key non-technical
barriers to successfully developing and using groupware will be discussed,
as well as new approaches to overcoming these challenges. The challenges
include cost/benefit disparities, critical mass achievement, social factors
in the workplace, Prisoner's Dilemma and Tragedy of the Commons paradoxes,
the difficulty of evaluation and generalization, the weakness of intuition,
and the problem of exception-handling.

LECTURE 3: Concepts and Examples of Cooperative Hypermedia Systems
Norbert A. Streitz

This lecture introduces the basic concepts of hypertext and hypermedia and
presents examples of their application in selected scenarios of
computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Hypermedia systems can serve as
an ideal basis for representing large pools of complex information as
structured networks by mapping a wide range of informal and formal
structures in a common representation. It is argued that the
characteristics of hypermedia (e.g., modularity, associativity,
informality) are well suited to provide a basis for representing
organizational memory information. There are two roles for hypermedia
structures: to be the subject matter of and a medium for cooperative work.
This proposal is discussed in the context of selected cooperative work
situations which are central to creating and using organizational memory
information as, e.g., cooperative distributed document preparation, agenda
planning and monitoring of meetings, group problem solving, argumentation
and decision making. Examples of existing cooperative hypermedia systems
are presented and evaluated in terms of their user-interfaces, task
functionality, group support functionality, and their underlying design
decisions.

LECTURE 4: Cognitive Function Analysis and Active Documents
Guy Boy

The objective of this lecture is to help participants learn about a
cognitive function analysis (CFA) method for designing and assessing the
use of software agents; assess the importance of cognitive simulations
during the design life cycle; relate cognitive functions analysis to design
rationale creation and maintenance. Human-centered automation will be
defined as a transfer of cognitive functions from humans to machines. Such
cognitive functions can be either specific or generic. They can be stored
and reused for further analysis. This modeling perspective corresponds to
the current trend of component programming. We believe that design is
(computer-supported) writing. Designers produce notes, technical reports,
briefings, etc. to explain what they do or intend to do. The way these
documents are designed and produced is crucial. They incrementally define
the final product. Cognitive simulations can be kept as active documents to
preserve design rationale. Such active documents are created and maintained
along with several experiments. The final active document should define the
end product. An example will be developed: the redesign of the current
interface of an industrial planning system. In performing this
(event-driven) CFA, we will compare it to a goal-driven task analysis
(GOMS). We will show how human-centered design rationale can be stored and
maintained.

LECTURE 5: Software Agent Technology
Jeffrey Bradshaw

Software agents have been proposed as one way to help people better cope
with the increasing volume and complexity of information and computing
resources in the content-rich, context-poor world of the next decade. What
will such agents do? At the user interface, they will work in conjunction
with compound document frameworks and document management tools to select
the right data, assemble the needed components, and present the information
in the most appropriate way for a specific user and situation. Behind the
scenes, agents will take advantage of distributed object management,
database, workflow, messaging, transaction, and networking capabilities to
discover, link, and securely access the appropriate data and services. In
this lecture, participants will be introduced to the basic concepts of
agent technology. Various approaches and perspectives will be compared and
contrasted as they are being used in research and industrial settings. Many
of these will be described by video clips and live demonstrations. We will
discuss current efforts to promote agent interoperability through the
various standards groups and research collaborations, and give a forecast
of the future of agent technology.

LECTURE 6: Software Agent Adaptivity in Documentation Systems
Guy Boy

Participants will learn to design adaptive indexing mechanisms; to analyze
electronic documentation architectures to improve information traceability
and retrieval; to evaluate context-sensitive user interfaces to
organizational memory systems. This course will start with an analysis of
existing electronic documentation approaches useful for the design of
organizational memory systems. A particular emphasis will be put on
Intranet systems, i.e., internal communication, cooperation and
coordination systems adapted to enterprise requirements as technological
supports of a Corporate Memory (CM). CM work that will be presented is
multidisciplinary and multidomain, and is focused on the construction of CM
concepts for industrial applications, e.g., traceability of design
decisions, design life cycle, case management, and active documents. We
will focus on major problems linked to the existence or availability of the
right information at the right time in the right place, and in the right
understandable format. In this perspective, we will develop the concept of
software agents as intelligent assistant systems. Several artificial agents
will be described in the aerospace domain. We will discuss how software
agent technology enables users to center their interactions at the content
level (semantics) partially removing syntactic difficulties. It also
enables users to index (contextualize) content to specific situations that
they understand better (pragmatics). The participants will learn about
adaptive indexing through the CID approach (Computer Integrated
Documentation).

LECTURE 7: Ubiquitous Collaboration and Virtual Organizations
Norbert A. Streitz

A comprehensive view of ubiquitous collaboration scenarios including
desktop-based and electronic meeting room collaboration is presented to
discuss requirements for supporting synchronous and asynchronous
cooperation and the transitions between them. Comprehensive project
activities include these different collaboration situations. Thus, it is
necessary to capture the different kinds of information which are created
over time and to represent them in a project memory which is part of an
overall corporate memory. The range of pre-, in- and post meeting
activities and their representation, e.g., in hypermedia minutes, provides
an example for this view. In order to illustrate this approach, two
cooperative hypermedia systems, SEPIA and DOLPHIN, developed at GMD-IPSI,
are presented in terms of design rationale and system features. First hand
experiences as well as results from different controlled empirical
evaluations exploring different hypermedia structures and "roomware"
variables are reported. Building on this, extensions for distributed or
virtual organizations are presented. This includes ubiquitous meeting
systems based on ATM networks. The lectures will be complemented by video
clips.

LECTURE 8: Overcoming Groupware Challenges: Case Studies of a Slowly
Emerging Success
Jonathan Grudin

Groupware has taken longer to take root than many expected. This lecture
will look at one groupware application, meeting scheduling that accompanies
electronic calendar systems. After being almost universally under-utilized
for 15 years, this feature is now being heavily used in some environments.
Case studies of scheduling at Microsoft, Sun, and Boeing will be described.
The reasons why the use of these applications suddenly flourished will be
identified, including pervasive behavioral and technical infrastructures,
better interfaces, more benefits for individual contributors, and tighter
coupling with email. The adoption path will be described: bottom-up and
marked by peer pressure. The existence of different cultures of use within
and across organizations will be discussed, and the possibly crucial role
of application defaults that are often given very little consideration
during roll-out.

LECTURE 9: Information Exchange Standards and Interoperability
Jeffrey Bradshaw

A variety of agent theories, architectures, and languages have been
proposed. However the potential for large-scale, cross-functional
deployment of general purpose agents in industrial and government settings
has been hampered by insufficient progress on infrastructural,
architectural, security, and scaling issues. Moreover, the complete lack of
standards has raised concerns about agent interoperability. A key
characteristic of agents is their ability to serve as universal mediators,
tying together loosely-coupled, heterogeneous components: the last thing
anyone wants is an agent architecture that can only accommodate a single
native language and a limited set of proprietary services to which it alone
can provide access. In this lecture, we will introduce KAoS, an open,
generic agent architecture that is optimized to work with Internet,
distributed object, and component technologies such as CORBA, OpenDoc, OLE,
and Java. KAoS defines a basic structure and core speech-act-based set of
agent-to-agent conversation protocols. To this basic structure and protocol
set, specific extensions and capabilities can be added as needed. Specific
applications of KAoS to design rationale, hypermedia, authoring,
collaboration, and performance support systems will be described.

LECTURE 10: Field Studies of the GIMMe System
Mike Atwood and Beatrix Zimmerman

This lecture continues with group memory systems and reports on two cycles
of system development and use of the GIMMe system. In the first cycle, we
focused on small communities of practice developing software systems. This
cycle identified several design challenges-how to design a group memory
system so that it is adopted by the groups, how to formalize large amounts
of information so that it is retrievable by the groups, how to design tools
which allow group members to further organize and summarize the information
in the system. We then evaluate the GIMMe system in this first study. We
evaluate how the group memory system got integrated into the work group,
how information was captured and organized, how information was retrieved,
and how useful and accessible the information was. We also briefly discuss
some observed social issues related to group memory systems.

In the second cycle we focused on a large (1000+ user) community with
diverse applications. This study focused more on the organization and how
individual groups within the organization contribute to an organizational
memory. We discuss the same design challenges as stated above but in the
context of an organization. We present a summary of our results for
individual groups and the usefulness of these memories to the organization.

LECTURERS
The course will be taught by the following team of distinguished lecturers:

MIKE ATWOOD, Ph.D. currently manages the Systems Engineering Process Group
at NYNEX Science and Technology (USA), which focuses on organizational
learning and on understanding and improving the system development process
and the Advanced Software Development Environment Group, where the current
focus is on developing tools and methodologies to facilitate and support
communication, collaboration, and mutual education within distributed work
groups. He is in his second term on the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee and
currently serving as Chair

GUY BOY, Ph.D. is Director of the European Institute of Engineering and
Cognitive (EURISCO). His research is in the analysis, design and evaluation
of human-centered automation in complex dynamic systems. He is involved in
the development of knowledge elicitation techniques and cognitive function
analysis. He is the author of a text book Intelligent Assistant Systems
(Academic Press, 1991), a chapter entitled Knowledge Elicitation for the
Design of Software Agents in the Handbook of Human Computer Interaction,
(Elsevier Science Pub. to appear in 1997) and a book entitled Cognitive
Funtion Analysis to be published by Ablex in 1997. He serves as Vice Chair
of the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee.

JEFFREY BRADSHAW, Ph.D. is a Senior Principal Scientist at the Research and
Technology Division of Boeing Computer Services, leading the Intelligent
Agent Technology project. He also maintains an affiliation with the Fred
Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where he leads a project to develop a
system to assist with long-term post-transplant care of bone marrow
transplant patients. Named a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in 1993, he
spent twelve months at the European Institute of Cognitive Sciences and
Engineering (EURISCO) in Toulouse, France. Among his other technical
publications, he edited the John Wiley book Knowledge Acquisition as a
Modeling Activity (with Ken Ford, 1993) and the AAAI/MIT Press book
Software Agents (1996, in press).

JONATHAN GRUDIN, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Information and Computer
Science at the University of California, Irvine. His research is in
computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and groupware; he is currently
studying the widespread deployment and use of new groupware technologies in
companies including Boeing, Sun, and Microsoft. Prior to taking academic
positions at Aarhus University in Denmark and UCI, he worked as a software
engineer at Wang Laboratories and project leader at MCC. He recently
co-wrote and co-edited the second edition of Readings in Human-Computer
Interaction. He has presented half-day and full-day tutorials on CSCW,
groupware, and workflow technology at many conferences, including ACM
SIGCHI, CSCW, Interact, and European CSCW.

NORBERT STREITZ, Ph.D. is the Deputy Director of the Integrated Publication
and Information Systems Institute (IPSI) of the German National Research
Center for Information Technology (GMD) in Darmstadt. He is the manager of
the research division "Cooperative Hypermedia Systems" and establishes now
a new research division "Workspaces of the Future (Ambiente)" He teaches
also at the Department of Computer Science of the Technical University
Darmstadt. His general research activities include hypertext and
hypermedia, human-computer interaction, and computer-supported cooperative
work (CSCW). Examples are: hypermedia-based information/knowledge
representations, cooperation-oriented group-interfaces, new interaction
paradigms, virtual organizations. A more recent activity is concerned with
the interaction of new ways of organizing work, characteristics of
information and communication technology and their implications for the
design of real environments including the architecture of buildings. He has
edited 10 books and published more than 60 technical publications.

EATRIX ZIMMERMANN, M.S. is currently coordinating and implementing a
communication infrastructure for NYNEX Next Step at NYNEX, Science and
Technology USA, a program which will involve over 1000 NYNEX employees and
17 community colleges throughout the NYNEX region. This infrastructure
focuses on group communication, collaboration, mutual understanding and
documentation.

LOCATION
The summer school will take place at Saint-Lary, located in the heart of
the Pyrénées Mountains in the south of France, 150 kilometers (100 miles)
from Toulouse. Saint-Lary offers a breath-taking setting for all kinds of
outdoor activities as well as the charm of local markets, folklore and a
thermal spa.

COURSE FEE AND PAYMENT
The full course fee is 12 000 FF (20.6% VAT included). This includes
tuition for five days, a full set of course materials, as well as meals and
lodging from Sunday evening August 24th to Friday August 29th, 1997. Due to
the nature of this summer school, the number of participants will be
limited to 50. Participants will be accepted on a first come, first served
basis.

Payment may be made by cheque in French Francs made out to EURISCO or by
bank transfer to EURISCO's bank: Credit Lyonnais-Agence Croix Pierre, N°
30002/04038/0000079297J/08, indicating your name.

REGISTRATION
Application for registration must be received before June 15th, 1997. Full
course fee must be paid to EURISCO by July 15th, 1997.

ACCOMPANYING PERSONS
A limited number of accompanying persons can be housed at the course site.
There is no charge for accompanying persons, but additional expenses
(meals, beverages, etc.) must be paid directly to the hotel. Further
details can be obtained from the summer school secretariat; early
notification is required.

Summer School'97 Office
Helen Wilson
EURISCO, 4, avenue Edouard Belin
31400 Toulouse, France
Tel. +33 (0) 5 62 17 38 38 - Fax: +33 (0) 5 62 17 38 39
Email: [log in to unmask]
www-eurisco.onecert.fr/summer.html

Reply form

__ I would like to apply for registration to the summer school on
Human-Centered Design of Organizational Memory Systems.

Application for registration must be received before June 15th, 1997. The
full course fee mustbe paid to EURISCO by July 15th, 1997.

Name:.......................................................................

Position:
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Affiliation:
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Address:
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Phone:
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Name, address of persons potentially interested in this Summer School:
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Please return this form to:

Summer School'97
Helen Wilson
EURISCO, 4, avenue Edouard Belin,
31400 Toulouse, France
Tel: +33 (0) 5 62 17 38 38 - Fax: +33 (0) 5 62 17 38 39
Email: [log in to unmask]
www-eurisco.onecert.fr/summer.html





__________________________________________________________________________
Helen Wilson
Institut Europeen de l'Ingenierie et des Sciences Cognitives (EURISCO)
4, avenue Edouard Belin, 31400 Toulouse, France
Tel: (33) (0) 5 62 17 38 38 - Fax: (33) (0) 5 62 17 38 39
Email: [log in to unmask] - http://www-eurisco.onecert.fr/

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