October 2004
NECTAR - sweet news for research in distance collaboration
Collaborating over distances is becoming more common, even essential, in business, manufacturing, research and education. But the technology for distance collaboration has a long way to go to capture the nuances of non-vocal face-to-face interaction such as body language and subtle changes in facial expression.
That’s why a $4.5 million federal government investment in NECTAR is sweet news for the blossoming field of collaborative research technology in Canada. Public and private sector partners, including Microsoft Research, Microsoft Canada, Smart Technology, Bell Canada and Avaya are expected to fund up to an additional $1.2 million.
The Network for Effective Collaboration Technologies Through Advanced Research (NECTAR), a new Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Canada (NSERC) research network will investigate the technological, social and linguistic issues that make computer-supported collaboration more efficient, productive and natural.
It involves researchers from various disciplines at six universities: the University of Toronto, British Columbia, Calgary and Saskatchewan, and Dalhousie and Queen’s University.
The research will focus on three themes.
Since casual face-to-face encounters can often spark collaborative efforts, the Commons theme focuses on overcoming distance-related impediments to the same kind of rich casual interaction in a “virtual Commons”, perhaps by developing technology that lets people easily track critical “awareness” information.
The second theme involves finding ways to match or even surpass the high-performance “Workroom” that involves not only face-to-face interaction, but also shared physical surfaces like tables and whiteboards.
The third theme involves presentations, traditionally held in a formal environment in which all people are in the same physical space at the same time. NECTAR’s goal is to provide groups with a flexible and scalable technology that manages presentations to both small and large groups, where the presentations can be easily accessed remotely in real time or after the fact.
The Network already has a head start on developing this third theme with a technology infrastructure called ePresence, an interactive webcasting and archiving system developed by ePresence Lab at the University of Toronto’s Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI).
Slated for open source release in the near future, NECTAR intends to test and refine its research results by augmenting and enhancing ePresence rather than starting from scratch.
Dr. Ronald Baecker, the Network’s scientific director, is a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto and the founder and chief scientist of KMDI. Dr. Saul Greenberg of the University of Calgary and Dr. Carl Gutwin of the University of Saskatchewan will act as team leaders. Dr. Kellogg Booth of the University of British Columbia will be associate director for NECTAR.
For more information, visit www.nectar-research.net or http://epresence.tv.
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