ylfink@water.UUCP (ylfink) (03/18/86)
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SEMINAR
- Friday, March 21, 1986.
Dr. Ernest Chang from the Alberta Research Council,
Calgary will speak on ``Participant Systems''.
TIME: 3:30 PM
ROOM: MC 5158
ABSTRACT
A Participant System is a distributed computer system
that facilitates the simultaneous interaction of
several persons working together, possibly over several
physical locations, on a shared complex task. To do so,
it must support communications, multiple views, and
common data, action and cognitive space. Such a system
must coordinate access to a common problem representa-
tion, and contain sufficient knowledge and expertise in
the problem domain to integrate the activities of the
users, and even to participate as one of the experts.
This represents a new paradigm for computing, a depar-
ture from the traditional one-person-to-one virtual
machine mode, to one that more directly reflects the
nature of human problem solving in the group situation.
Participant Systems differ from computer conferencing
systems in several ways. They are real time, rather
than asynchronous. They deal with the solution of
specific tasks, rather than the communication of text-
based messages; they are therefore knowledge based, in
contrast to computer conference systems, which are com-
munications oriented but have no specific semantic
knowledge of what is being discussed.