Collaborative Problem Solving Environments (PDF)

Collaboration tools and problem solving environments (PSEs) have historically evolved independently, despite the fact that most of their developers would agree that transitions between team and individual work are facile and frequent in the real world. The explanation of this paradox has roots in both technology limitations and our lack of understanding of the details of how team and individual work are related and how to encode those relations in software. Progress is being made in both of these areas, and, as a result, there is growing interest in discussion between the collaborative systems and PSE communities, and a growing number of systems that provide collaboration and PSE functionality. We envision this Collaborative Problem-Solving Environments (CPSEs) minitrack as a forum for bringing these communities together and hope that the selected papers will provide the basis for a lively discussion of the issues involved in designing, developing, and deploying CPSEs in science and...