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Du Li
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Collaboration is an inherent part of our everyday life. People have different and evolutionary ways of collaborating with each other. My research goal is to develop collaborative systems and models to support the cooperative work of users over the Internet, especially end users, in a distributed environment that possibly features a range of (palmtop to wallmounted) displays and devices. Specific ongoing projects explore both collaboration transparent and aware approaches to groupware engineering: The ICT project aims to develop a new generation of application sharing systems that are able to share heterogeneous familiar applications and support unconstrained interaction. The EFG project aims to develop a component-based framework for groupware applications that are adaptable and adaptive during actual use, especially collaboration protocols. Both ICT and EFG are also related to end-user programming and intelligent user interfaces in some way. Besides, as we use editors every day (who does not?) and a wide range of collaborative systems can be modeled as group editors, my group often uses group editors as a testbed application and looks into concurrency control issues, esp. operational transformation algorithms. Current projects can more or less be related back to my early experiences with COCA. Recently I am reorganizing all these projects into one called EXEC, an Evolvable and eXtensible Environment for Collaboration. It aims at providing an infrastructure for supporting everyday collaboration (sort of operating system).
While my projects are things that I can get going with limited resources, my research interests are not necessarily bound by projects. At least, collaborative systems should be interpreted much more broadly than systems/algorithms for synchronous collaboration (which I have been focusing on). Information sharing and human-computer interaction are also part of the story. Also consider the variety of combinations out of {human, computer}: people-people, people-machines-people, people-machines, machine-machine, ... There are indeed a wide spectrum of research problems including systems, algorithms, user interfaces, evaluation methods, and organization issues.