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The WET ICE workshop, now in its third year, has become a fixture of the collaborative computing scene. It is a more specialized event than the large Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) gathering that takes in everyone from anthropologists to futurists, and everything in between. This workshop has focussed from its inception on technology, hardware or software, that enables agents of all kinds, human or otherwise, to interact in a variety of ways to get some work done -- fast, right the first time, and with minimum effort. In this the workshop has served to underscore the thrust of Concurrent Engineering explicit in the name of the Research Center at West Virginia University which organizes the WET ICE workshops.
The workshops have skirted the consideration of methodologies that facilitate coordinated working, choosing to concentrate only on those techniques that have received the support of computing devices, broadly speaking, and that have transformed themselves into technologies, in however primitive a fashion. WET ICE has had to steer clear also of very extensive fields, such as distributed computing, client-server data bases, and multimedia, which are all served by several large conferences. It seemed wise to cede the privilege of gathering researchers working in such exciting disciplines to those conferences. However, by positioning WET ICE precisely at the confluence of technology and collaboration in organizations, and emphasizing its small select nature, it has been possible to cull those disciplines and present the best research that has a bearing on the "re-personalization" of computing, as Fernando Flores, founder of Action Technologies, puts it.
This year the 36 papers submitted came from Canada, France, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and, of course, the USA. The referees did a magnificent job of refereeing the papers and selected 24 of them, all of which were submitted in PostScript via the network. As in the past workshops, there were papers on network conferencing, computer protocols designed for collaboration, and architectures for information sharing among participants in a project. The many papers contributed in enterprise modelling, software engineering, and workflow showed that these new areas of collaboration technology were emerging from the laboratory into the real world. Based on the interest profiles of the participants, three discussion groups formed and met for about eight hours; their reports summarize the state of the art in three distinct areas: enterprise modelling, collaborative software engineering, and technology trends for collaborative support environments.
Twice after the workshop, a videotape of the workshop presentations and the working group summaries was broadcast over the MBONE video conference network, allowing more people to benefit from the research presented and discussed.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society continues to underwrite and support these workshops. WET ICE owes its existence to the initial generosity of the Society, which is consistently repaid by the quality of the papers contributed and attendance by a select band of researchers every year. The American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) put up a considerable sum to fund 13 student participants this year; the organizers express their thanks for this subsidy. The recognition of the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Office Information Systems (ACM SIGOIS) is also acknowledged. ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense, supports the Concurrent Engineering Research Center in its essential mission of dissemination; all of the organizational effort that went into the workshop was funded by ARPA. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. V. Jagannathan for his great help and expertise in workshop management, and Ms. Mary Carriger for relieving me of much of the burden of coordinating and conducting this workshop.
How to Order Workshop Proceedings
| Workshop Agendahttp://www.cerc.wvu.edu/WETICE/WETICE94/WETICE94_report.html