Artificial Neural Network for Cooperative Distributed Environments

Abstract

Distributed systems have become increasingly common because they offer significant computational power and are cost-effective and scalable. Moreover, collaboration between users that are part of these distributed systems improves efficiency and effectiveness for a better utilization of this computational power. Because of this, new specific collaboration/cooperative models for distributive systems are needed for enabling effective collaboration/cooperation between users of these dynamic environments or Cooperative Distributed Environments (CDEs). A CDE is then an environment in which multiple users in remote locations participate in shared activity aiming to achieve a common goal. Most of the CDE work towards providing reliable, customized and QoS guaranteed dynamic computing environments for end-users. The success of achieving this goal in proper time (efficiency) and/or to obtain the higher quality of results (effectiveness) depends on implementing an appropriate collaboration model that should include learning abilities necessary for the use of the previous experience acquired (with situations that occurred in the past) in order to improve new required collaborations. On the other hand, according to CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) awareness is a useful concept used to achieve cooperation and collaboration in CDE as it increases communication opportunities (Matsushita & Okada, 1995). A collaborative process is leaded by five processes (Kuwana & Horikawa, 1995) (Malone & Crowston, 1994): 1) copresence, that gives the feeling that the user is in a shared environment with some other user at the same time; 2) awareness, a process where users recognize each other s activities on the premise of co-presence, for instance “What are they doing?”, “Where are they working?”; 3) communication; 4) collaboration which together with communication permit users to collaborate between each other for accomplishing the tasks and common goals; and 5) coordination which is needed to resolve the conflicts towards effective collaboration. In the same order of ideas, in CSCL (Computer Supported Collaborative Learning), awareness plays an important role as it promotes collaboration opportunities in a natural and efficient way (Ogata & Yano, 1998) and improves effectiveness of collaborative learning. In this matter, Gutwin et al identified the following types of awareness (Gutwin et al, 1995): social, task, concept, workspace, and knowledge. Moreover, SMI (Spatial Model of Interaction) (Benford & Fahlen, 1993) is one of the awareness models proposed with the purpose to obtain any knowledge of the immediately closer world in collaborative virtual environments. It is based primarily on the use of a