Message from the Editors-in-Chief

Apply

Message from the Editors-in-Chief

Journal Title: EAI Endorsed Transactions on Collaborative Computing - Year 2015, Vol 1, Issue 2

Abstract

We are very pleased to welcome you all to the second issue of this journal. In this issue, we present six selected invited papers that span various aspects of collaborative computing and technologies. In particular, the themes of the papers cover Crowdsourcing, a collaborative approach to secure and oblivious storage, a virtual network infrastructure to enable collaboration, collaborative social navigation support for way-finding for people with disabilities, a collaborative approach to sharing information in social networks, and an approach to understand collaboration and coordination among members in a community. This issue, thus, aims to highlight the role of collaboration technologies and techniques in highly diverse application domains. We thank the authors for their valuable contributions. In “Reconciling Schema Matching Networks Through Crowdsourcing,” authors Viet Hung, Thanh Tam, Miklós and Aberer propose to use crowdsourcing techniques to address the challenge of schema matching during data integration. The proposed Crowdsourcing technique tries to validate the correspondences between the attributes of database schema generated by a large group of people who are non-experts. The work assumes that there is a need to have attribute correspondences established not just between two schemas but also in a network. However, there is a potentially inherent unreliability issue with regards to the users’ inputs in Crowdsourcing. The authors propose using integrity and consistency constraints to improve the process. They show that such constraints improve aggregated answers, and also help estimate better the quality of answers of each worker and detect potential spammers. Frikken, Wang and Atallah in “A Scheme for Collaboratively Processing Nearest Neighbor Queries in Oblivious Storage” address the issue related to confidentiality of both the outsourced data as well as the patterns of access to that data. They propose an extension of the existing Oblivious Storage semantics to include an oblivious index. The proposed oblivious index supports finding the keys nearest to the query in the key-value store. The authors show that the extension has performance that is similar to the existing Oblivious Storage schemes in terms of storage at both clients and servers, as well as the rounds of communication involved. Juste, Jeong, Eom, Baker and Figueiredo in “TinCan: User-Defined P2P Virtual Network Overlays for Ad-hoc Collaboration,” propose a virtual network called TinCan that is based on peer-to-peer private tunnels. Such virtual private networks are important for collaborative environments to provide private, authenticated communication between collaborating partners that belong to multiple institutions and are potentially mobile. The paper presents the architecture and design of TinCan which goes beyond the traditional centralized VPN based approaches. They also present a prototype that supports Windows, Linux, and Android mobile devices, and its experimental evaluation. In “Wayfinding and Navigation for People with Disabilities Using Social Navigation Networks,” authors Karimi, Dias, Pearlman and Zimmerman focus on issues related to safe and independent mobility associated with navigation of unfamiliar indoor as well as outdoor environments. They argue that despite great advances in technologies, the existing solutions for way-finding and navigation do not appropriately address the needs of the people with disabilities (PWDs). The authors further argue that such limitations exist because there is a lack of experience centric approach integrated into these systems and services. They propose using a hybrid approach where the compute-centric and experience-centric methods are combined to overcome such shortcomings to support the needs of the PWDs.

Authors and Affiliations

James Jun, Calton Pu

Keywords

Message from the Editors-in-Chief

EP ID EP45683
DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.4108/cc.1.2.e1
Views 475
Downloads 0