CTS 2015 Keynotes

The 2015 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems

(CTS 2015)

June 01 - 05, 2015

The Westin Atlanta Airport Hotel

Atlanta, Georgia, USA

CTS 2015 KEYNOTES & PLENARIES

Tuesday Keynote: Video Communication for the 21st Century

Kori Inkpen

Microsoft Research

Redmond, Washington, USA

NOTES (forthcoming)

Wednesday Keynote: Designing Online Collaboration: Opportunities and Challenges

Amy Bruckman

School of Interactive Computing

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

NOTES (forthcoming)

Thursday Keynote: Privacy in the Information Sharing Age:

Lost Cause or the Next Frontier?

Douglas M. Blough

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

NOTES (forthcoming)

CTS 2015 Plenary: Collaboration in Software Product Development Teams

Chandra Chikkareddy

Senior Director of Engineering

PayPal Inc., San Jose, California, USA

NOTES (forthcoming)

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Tuesday Keynote: Video Communication for the 21st Century

Kori Inkpen

Microsoft Research

Redmond, Washington, USA

ABSTRACT

Video has become a pervasive communication medium with mainstream platforms such as YouTube, Skype, FaceTime, and Hangouts having enormous penetration in society, and new video start-ups announced almost daily. Despite the rise of video, we argue that we have only scratched the surface of the potential that video has to enrich our everyday lives. Too often we only think of video as a technology to share a funny cat video or call a distant friend or relative. Similar to how text messaging evolved and changed the way people communicate, video provides new opportunities to enrich and augment existing forms of communication. The neXus Group at Microsoft Research is exploring next generation video to enable anytime, anywhere video communication that moves beyond traditional “talking heads” to support rich shared experiences.

This talk will showcase some of the many ways video is changing how we interact with others and justify why we should embrace the video generation. Video is already being used to enhance many activities in our daily lives, however, current tools are not well designed to support people doing things together. To better understand the challenges and opportunities in this space, we have explored ways video can enhance daily activities such as homework, shopping, watching TV, and going to the park, as well as special occasions like birthday parties or concerts and festivals. Results from this work reveal opportunities to enhance video communication systems and move beyond talking heads to enable remote people to truly “be together” and “do things together”.

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Wednesday Keynote: Designing Online Collaboration: Opportunities and Challenges

Amy Bruckman

School of Interactive Computing

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

ABSTRACT

Online collaboration has led to surprising successes like Wikipedia, YouTube, open-source software, and more. Yet we are still in the early days of understanding its potential, and how to deliberately engineer systems to make new things possible. In this talk, I'll present research at Georgia Tech on creating new collaborative systems and deploying them with real users-including systems to raise awareness of social issues, and support group work on creative projects. I'll also discuss challenges to this type of work, including working with existing organizations, and creating, deploying, and sustaining research systems that users see in relation to commercial offerings.

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Thursday Keynote: Privacy in the Information Sharing Age:

Lost Cause or the Next Frontier?

Douglas M. Blough

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

ABSTRACT

The confluence of numerous technological, commercial, and social developments in recent years has led to enormous amounts of information, much of it personal, being available on public Web sites or stored on "private" third-party sites. Despite numerous warnings about oversharing, e.g. the "Please Rob Me" project, and seemingly daily announcements about massive data breaches occurring at major private enterprises, the march toward ever-increasing amounts of on-line information about individuals appears to be inexorable.

In this talk, I will review the current state of privacy, how we have arrived where we are today, and several promising developments on the horizon that might be able to slow the tide of information sharing/collection and privacy loss. I will also discuss how some of these developments might be applied in the area of collaborative work to allow a diverse group of users, with varying privileges and/or trust levels, to collaborate while maintaining different views of shared information. Better assurances on how information dissemination can be controlled during collaboration should encourage broader use of collaboration technologies and systems.

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CTS 2015 Plenary: Collaboration in Software Product Development Teams

Chandra Chikkareddy

Senior Director of Engineering

PayPal Inc., San Jose, California, USA

ABSTRACT

Building great software products involves creating highly collaborative work environment. Software projects tend to get very complex very quickly, and the glue that keeps the teams together apart from a solid vision is a highly collaborative and trustworthy culture. This talk will give a peek into how successful product development teams collaborate during various stages of the project including team setup, collaboration tools, leadership, top-down/bottoms-up information flow, decision making, agile process, challenges etc. I will pick a few examples of how we did this at Microsoft and PayPal, and the lessons learnt. This talk will also share insights on new industry trends shaping the future of collaboration in product development environments. Hope it will provide some insights for further research work on improving collaborative work in software based projects.