Intelligent Collaboration Transparency (ICT) is an application sharing framework for sharing familiar single-user tools (applications) for collaboration purposes without modifying their source code. At the user level, unmodified heterogeneous applications can be shared and interoperated. At the system level, the application sharing middleware is able to understand the behavior of the applications being shared. The main assumption underlying this work is that allowing collaborators to use familiar single-user tools for cooperative work can reduce development, deployment, and learning costs while improving individual and group productivity. // Overview Application Sharing is an element of remote access, falling under the collaborative software umbrella, that enables two or more users to access a shared application or document from their respective computers simultaneously in real-time. ...

History

The project is led by Professor Du Li and started in 2001 at Texas A&M university. Its first significant paper was published in the ACM CSCW 2002 Conference. In the system prototype, heterogeneous single-user editors such as Microsoft Word and GVim were shared to edit the same document. As in early application sharing systems, generality of the technical approach was pursued at this stage. A machine learning approach was explored to understand the editors' behavior such that window events can be translated between different editors for synchronization. Operational transformation was used for optimistic concurrency control, which allows any user to edit any part of the shared document at any time. However, due to engineering difficulties in understanding application behavior from external, only a small subset of the original editor functionality is allowed. The term computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) was first coined by Greif and Cashman in 1984, at a workshop attended by individuals interested in using technology to support people in their work (Grudin 1994). ... Microsoft Office Word is Microsofts flagship word processing software. ... GTK Vim (Gvim) Vim, which stands for Vi IMproved, is a free multi-platform text editor. ... // Overview Application Sharing is an element of remote access, falling under the collaborative software umbrella, that enables two or more users to access a shared application or document from their respective computers simultaneously in real-time. ... As a broad subfield of artificial intelligence, Machine learning is concerned with the development of algorithms and techniques that allow computers to learn. At a general level, there are two types of learning: inductive, and deductive. ...

At a later stage (2004), a diffing-based approach was taken to specialize the framework in the domain of group editing. The result was presented in an ACM CSCW 2006 paper. The users are still allowed to edit a shared document concurrently with heterogeneous single-user editors without being constrained. A diff algorithm is called to derive edit scripts at each site. Concurrent edit scripts are merged on the fly to synchronize states of editors. As a result, users are not limited by editing commands that can be understood by the application sharing middleware. This implementation strategy significantly reduces engineering costs. In principle, any single-user editor can be shared with very little effort. The term computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) was first coined by Greif and Cashman in 1984, at a workshop attended by individuals interested in using technology to support people in their work (Grudin 1994). ...

References

• A lightweight approach to transparent sharing of familiar single-user editors. Du Li and Jiajun Lu. ACM CSCW'06 Conference. Nov. 2006. Banff, Alberta, Canada.
• Transparent Sharing and Interoperation of Heterogeneous Single-User Applications. Du Li and Rui Li. ACM CSCW'02 Conference. Nov 16-20, 2002. New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
• Project website