Session Abstract

Advances in science and engineering are largely driven by collaborative efforts. Teams of researchers distributed in various parts of the world communicate with each other using various modalities that include messaging, email, telephone, voice over IP and video-conferencing. Over the past decade, major advances in middleware have led to widely available collaboration tools that are used today by disparate research teams. Although some minimal security in terms of authentication and privacy is available, it is clear from our experiences that such security is only available when using similar tools in a carefully configured environment. In a mobile world where researchers are touring various cities for conferences while working on their research, it is quite clear to us that there is no support for ad hoc collaboration. What is ad hoc collaboration? We define ad hoc collaboration to be environments that support spontaneous collaboration, where two or more people decide to have an unplanned interaction with one another. It enables participants to create collaboration groups on the fly with little involvement from an administrator. Within the guidelines, however, employees (or participants) can invite collaborators who may be non-employee and assign them various privileges. Some key highlights of ad hoc model include: Immediate provisioning of collaboration membership and privileges; Participation by employees or outsiders, without administrative involvement; Intuitive web-based user-interfaces requiring no user training; Advanced authentication, authorization, resource sharing, trust management and federated administration for ad hoc scenarios; Basic file collaboration capabilities, including upload, download, sharing, check-in/check-out, versioning, and detailed audit trails; Messaging, audio and video support via open standards such as HTTP, SIP, XMPP, SIMPLE, Web services, Grid Globus Toolkit. In this session, leading experts working with different aspects of ad hoc collaboration will share their findings.