Using Event Notification Servers to Support Awareness (slides - PDF)

Presenter: David Redmiles, Faculty, UCI/ISR and Workshop Co-Organizer

Abstract: There is a growing trend to design distributed software applications using an event notification or publish-subscribe design style. Communication among components is brokered by an event notification server. While serving the purposes of software designers to build systems that are more easily integrated and maintained, and are simply more flexible, event-based designs also allow various kinds of awareness to be supported. Awareness is the notion of end users having information about the activities of others that affect their own work. I describe some kinds of awareness including the following: group awareness, or information about presence and activity of colleagues; project awareness, or information about a specific task; and application awareness, or information about the state of software applications. The focus is on the last of these through an example scenario of monitoring a distributed application at run time. However, I will discuss how providing all kinds of awareness information is affected by the services provided by different servers. Some specific servers that provide examples for comparison are CASSIUS (developed at UCI), Siena (developed at CU Boulder), and Elvin (developed at the DSTC in Brisbane).

Bio: David Redmiles is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. His research lies in the overlap between human computer interaction and software engineering with a specialization in intelligent user interfaces and usability engineering. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1992. His dissertation research was in the area of software comprehension. Between 1992 and 1994, he worked as part of the research faculty in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. During this period, he performed research in the area of computer-supported cooperative work and distance learning. Before his Ph.D. research, he worked for several years at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) performing research-oriented software development for applications of scientific visualization and data manipulation.