Description:
Recent expert reports and research funding trends suggest that research groups will increasingly operate across geographic boundaries, forcing organizations to adapt to the problems of distributed collaboration. At the University of Michigan, personnel at the School of Information are split nearly evenly between two buildings that are nearly three miles apart, making the virtual organization of tomorrow a reality today for faculty, staff and students. This talk provides an introduction to one effort to minimize the impact of this dispersion, the Connection Project. The Connection Project is an experiment in the development, deployment and evaluation of high-quality conferencing technologies within the School of Information using the University's shared network infrastructure. The project leverages a number of high-bandwidth technoloiges, such as DVTS and high-resolution MPEG-4 capture, to provide an extremely high-quality conferencing experience between the two locations. This presentation will focus on the design and deployment of the facilities and will present findings from studies of the human factors and organizational impacts of the Connection Project systems that will be instructive to other projects trying to leverage high performance networks, such as Abilene, to overcome the barriers of distance in their work.
Speaker(s):
Erik Hofer, University of Michigan
|
