BiographyWeigang Wang studied mathematics and information system engineering during his undergraduate and postgraduate years. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Liverpool. Before joined Manchester, he worked as research scientist at the German Research Centre for Information Technology (GMD). He was GMD site project manager for the Euro EU EXTERNAL project, focusing on information system support for virtual enterprises. His work focuses on cooperative hypermedia which deals with all aspects of how hypermedia technologies can be used to facilitate and coordinate work between multiple users. He has designed and developed several cooperative hypermedia systems and he has served as the programme committee member for ACM Hypertext for many years, and served as PC cooperative hypermedia theme chair of the ACM Hypertext'05. He was chair of the first international workshop on Computational Hypermedia and is the joint-chair of the international workshop on "Web Science: Collaboration and Collective Intelligence" held jointly with ACM Hypertext'08. His work has appeared in some of the major journals in his field, including ACM Transaction on Information System, Information Processing and Management, Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW), International Journal of Human Computer Studies, International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, Expert Systems with Applications, and Journal of Network and Computer Applications. Teaching and research interestsWeigang teaches Distributed Systems and Internet Technology, Web Technology and Practice II, Human Computer Interaction and User Interface, Management and IT Projects. His research students work on flexible process support, meeting support, decision support, common ground and trust building related topics. Currently, Weigang investigates web-based collaborative hypermedia systems and their underlying methodologies and frameworks for meeting support, decision support, flexible process support, project management, and collaborative learning. He also researches into new way of working and learning enabled by and co-evolved with emerging web technologies, especially the ones combining AJAX and Semantic Web, which provide not only semantic-rich interactive knowledge structures, but also intelligent computational support. On going research on PowerMeeting The research on PowerMeeting focuses on how to use Web as a platform for real time human to human interaction. I believe that the social and technical protocols underlying computer-mediated human to human interaction influence each other and co-evolve over time and through practice. Therefore, a multi-faceted approach has been taken to address the various issues relating to Web-based synchronous collaboration support. On theoretical front, I explore social and cognitive theories that can inform the design and use of Web-based groupware. Conceptual frameworks are derived from applicable parts of the theories. These frameworks have a more direct mapping to interaction protocols, which can be turned into system specifications or methodology on how the system should be used. On technology front, I investigate higher-level technical protocols enabled by the emergent AJAX and AJAX Push technology to facilitate the development of Web-based synchronous groupware. These technical protocols provide a basis for high level social protocols for Web-mediated real time collaboration. More specifically, one of such higher level technical protocols is a new transactional concurrency control protocol that would incur a relatively low overhead upon an asynchronous event communication channel. The goal is to achieve a sub second latency that is needed for realising a real time response time. The other technical protocol is a cooperative model-view/controller programming model that makes the development synchronous groupware easier, as it can release the developers from juggling with multiple client and server side programming languages and programming models and from struggling with the fragmented asynchronous callbacks that are particularly hard to handle when multiple remote objects are involved in one transaction. Built on these, more comprehensive development support is provided through the PowerMeeting framework and its underlying CommonGround toolkit. To support the social protocols and the co-evolution of the social and technical protocols, an interaction pattern based development approach is taken for an incremental, iterative development of a prototype system. A pattern language has been emerging in the development process. Such pattern language may serve as a bridge between the developers and the users of the system. The pattern language can help developers to discuss the system design between themselves, communicate the design ideas with user representatives, and facilitate end users in understanding the intent behind the system design so as to guide them follow best practice patterns and explore emerging interaction protocols. In this way, it is hoped that one of the most difficult problems in synchronous groupware application, i.e., the adoption of synchronous groupware or the wide participation in real time collaboration, can be better addressed. Various of domain-specific tools are in development. Case studies and evaluative studies are also ongoing or planned to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches, to test our research hypotheses, and to feedback into the iterative development process. Publications on PowerMeeting
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Weigang Wang's work |