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The Department of Computer Science and the School of Medicine and Dentistry, |
The Mushroom platform is now publicly available for interested parties to download.
Mushroom is a generic workspace model and platform for supporting collaboration and group interaction for the Internet. It began development during 1996-1997 under funding from the UK EPSRC's Multimedia and Networking Applications programme.
We have obtained further funding to develop and evaluate the model and platform further in the context of a demanding medical application: the care of diabetic patients. More details appear below.
Pat Healey (Principal Investigator), George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore, Peter Johnson, Peter Kopelman, Jeannette Naish, Nick Bryan-Kinns, Damien Papworth, Tim Kindberg (currently an external consultant to project Mushroom).
The project aims to test the assumption that appropriately tailored shared multimedia workspaces can improve users' ability to perform cooperative tasks which they formerly carried out using separate databases and without integrated means of communication. An important part of the assumption is that it is possible to maintain or improve the levels of security and data integrity provided to users.
We shall further develop the security and data integrity provisions in our existing Mushroom model and platform for computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), and evaluate it in the management of diabetes, working with an identified group of clinicians engaged in shared patient care. Security issues arise in the confidentiality of patient data and the access control restrictions that apply for different users. Data integrity issues arise because users make concurrent updates, and standard formats and constraints apply to data values.
We shall investigate how to present security and integrity features to users so that they can apply their policies accurately and with confidence, by pursuing our existing work on 'boundaries' around workspaces, and on access control for group-working.
For the evaluation framework, we shall investigate the usability factors associated with diabetes management as an application of our platform, so as to be able to draw conclusions about our workspace model, as well as this application of it.
A one-day workshop on workspace models for collaboration was held on Monday 12th April 1999 at the Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary & Westfield College, University of London. Details including the papers and most of the presentations are included here.
Position papers due: 29th January 1999 -- note revised deadline
Notification of acceptance: 11th February 1999
Workshop: 12th April 1999
Accepted papers will be published here on these web pages in advance of the workshop and will be used to define the workshop sessions.
Publication will be sought if there are enough high quality position papers, and if the selected authors are willing to expand them into full papers.
The new research began, January 1998, and is scheduled to run for two years.
Two research assistants have been recruited for two years with, respectively, distributed systems and HCI expertise, though each can take into account both human factors and systems issues, and with practical programming skills. We have also recruited a programmer for one year.
There are also a number of publications resulting from the project which give more information.
For additional/current information mail us.
This page is continuously being updated as more information becomes available.
For more information on Mushroom, contact Pat Healey.
References: other collaborative systems and interesting papers.
You are visitor number to this page since July 9, 1997.
Last updated 14th August 2000
