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The Third International Conference on Digital Society ICDS 2009 February 1-7, 2009 - Cancun, Mexico |
| Tutorials |
T1. Working in Harmony: Integrating the efforts of usability engineers and agile software developers
by
Jason Chong Lee and D. Scott McCrickard
Center for Human-Computer Interaction/Virginia Tech, USA
T2. Decision support for environmental analysis and planning with the EMDS system
by
Keith M Reynolds, US Dept. of Agriculture - Pacific Northwest Research Station/Corvallis, USA
Mark Jensen, US Dept. of Agriculture - Northern Region/Missoula, USA
Paul F Hessburg, US Dept. of Agriculture - Pacific Northwest Research Station/Wenatchee, USA
T3. Geospatial Decision Making in the Semantic Web
by
Patrick Maué and Sven Schade, Institute for Geoinformatics/University of Münster, Germany
Dumitru Roman, Semantics Technology Institute/University of Innsbruck, Austria
DETAILS
T1. Working in Harmony: Integrating the efforts of usability engineers and agile software developers
by
Jason Chong Lee and D. Scott McCrickard
Center for Human-Computer Interaction/Virginia Tech, USA
For people unfamiliar to agile software development, this tutorial will provide a brief introduction to the domain and how it differs from and is complementary to usability engineering methods. The primary focus of the session will be on how usability teams can integrate into agile software development organizations. These methods will use practices drawn from scenario-based usability engineering—an established usability engineering technique and XP and Scrum—two of the most widely practiced agile methods [1][3]. This session will be of most benefit to usability engineers and software development professionals who are interested in developing usable software within an agile development framework.
Jason Chong Lee is a graduate student at Virginia Tech completing his dissertation on integrating agile and usability development methods. He is currently working with Meridium, Inc., a software development and services company, to apply this research to their existing software development practices with the support of an NSF Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I grant (IIP-0740827).
Dr. Scott McCrickard is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Center for HCI at Virginia Tech. His research focuses on design methods for interactive systems. He has experience working with companies on interface development, most recently with Meridium, Inc. on techniques to integrate Agile Usability into their work processes.
http://people.cs.vt.edu/~mccricks
T2. Decision support for environmental analysis and planning with the EMDS system
by
Keith M Reynolds, US Dept. of Agriculture - Pacific Northwest Research Station/Corvallis, USA
Mark Jensen, US Dept. of Agriculture - Northern Region/Missoula, USA
Paul F Hessburg, US Dept. of Agriculture - Pacific Northwest Research Station/Wenatchee, USA
The Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) system is an application framework for knowledge-based decision support of ecological assessments at any geographic scale. EMDS integrates state-of-the-art geographic information system (GIS) as well as knowledge-based reasoning and decision modeling technologies in the Microsoft Windows® environment to provide decision support for a substantial portion of the adaptive management process of environmental management. A summary of recent applications of the system published in scientific literature is presented on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMDS .
Dr. Keith Reynolds is a research forester with the Pacific Northwest Research Station (USDA Forest Service) and is located at the Corvallis Forestry Sciences Laboratory in Corvallis, OR . His primary areas of expertise are statistics, biomathematics, and knowledge-based systems theory and application. He has been the team leader on the Ecosystem Management Decision Support project at the PNW Station since 1993, designing and implementing new decision support system technologies for integrated multi-scale landscape analysis and planning.
Dr. Reynolds currently is directing implementation of EMDS 4.0, supported by the USFS National Forest System as one of its primary tools for landscape analysis, and now under the stewardship of the University of Redlands ( Redlands, CA ). Since the late 1990s, he also has worked on various EMDS applications, including watershed analysis, forest ecosystem sustainability, landscape integrity, and forest fuels management.
Dr. Paul Hessburg is a research landscape ecologist with the USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, Forestry Sciences Laboratory in Wenatchee, WA, and Affiliate Professor in the College of Forest Resources at the University of Washington . He has 25 years of professional experience in forest health and protection management and research. His primary areas of expertise are studies of regional climate-landscape pattern-disturbance process interactions, quantitative studies of landscape resilience, decision support modeling of complex forestry decisions, and basic studies of the ecology, epidemiology, and management of native forest pathogens and insects. He has been the research leader of the Station’s East-side Forest Health Restoration Team since 2001.
Dr. Hessburg is currently co-directing development of a regional-scale fire danger decision support application for the Pacific Northwest, which when completed will enable decision-makers to make annually calibrated fire prevention investments. He is also directing the implementation of a province-scale modeling effort to estimate the probable flow routes of future large wildfires in the eastern Cascades of Washington State. Such a tool will enable managers and decision-makers to reduce the size and likelihood of large fires, and their consequences to the northern spotted owl, a well-known sensitive species. Since the late 1990s, he has co-developed and published EMDS applications addressing forest landscape sustainability, prioritizing landscapes for restoration, and prioritizing vegetation and fuels treatments within landscapes.
Dr. Mark Jensen is the Regional Analyst for the USDA Forest Service, Northern Region. Mark has been employed by the Forest Service for 30 years and during this time has: administered the soil and water programs on the Caribou and Humboldt National Forests of the Intermountain Region; served as Quantitative Ecologist and Regional Soil Scientist for the Northern Region; and was shanghaied by the Pacific Northwest Research Station to act as a co-team leader for the Congressional Eastside Forest Health Assessment of Oregon and Washington, and the Landscape Ecology Science Team Assessment of the Columbia River Basin.
Dr. Jensen’s academic achievements include a BS in Natural Resource Management from the Univ. of Calif. - Berkeley, an Honors Degree in Physical Geography from St. Andrews Univ. - Scotland, and a PhD in Soil Science from Oregon State Univ. Additionally, Mark has served as an adjunct professor at Idaho State Univ., The Univ. of Montana, Montana State Univ., and Washington State Univ. In his current position, Mark provides advice and assistance to Forest planning efforts within the Northern Region and he is careful to remind us that “there are no problems in Forest planning, just significant opportunities for improvement”. Mark will hopefully be survived by his wife and four children (ages 1 to 12).
T3. Geospatial Decision Making in the Semantic Web
by
Patrick Maué and Sven Schade, Institute for Geoinformatics/University of Münster, Germany
Dumitru Roman, Semantics Technology Institute/University of Innsbruck, Austria
The proposed tutorial is based on results and solutions developed within the European funded SWING project [1]. Geospatial decision making with the help of geographic information served via spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) can benefit significantly from Semantic Web technologies. In the context of mining (especially, finding suitable locations for new excavation sites), a sophisticated solution based on various semanticenabled software components has been developed. They realize, for example, the following innovative functionalities: complex reasoning for the discovery of geospatial resources, annotation of geospatial web services using intuitive user interfaces, specification of workflows to create new information from existing web services, and more. The outcome is not only based on the work within the SWING project, though. Most of the presented applications and solutions have been developed over many years in several projects like ACEGIS [2], SODIUM [3], DIP [4], or SUPER[5].
The tutorial is discussing the benefits of the various solutions developed in the projects, and introduces methods how to deploy them into other scenarios.
Patrick Maué is currently pursuing a PhD at the Institute for Geoinformatics (http://ifgi.unimuenster.de) in Münster, Germany. His research is focussed on possible synergies effects between the Semantic Web and systems for geographic information retrieval (GIR). He works in the European funded SWING project and the German funded project GDIGrid (http://www.gdigrid.de). He holds a diploma in Geoinformatics which he has acquired at theInstitute for Geoinformatics.
Sven Schade is pursuing a PhD at the Institute for Geoinformatics in Münster, Germany. He is an expert in SDI, schema translation, and ontology engineering and currently leads the ontology work package of the SWING project. He holds a diploma in Geoinformatics which he has acquired at the Institute for Geoinformatics in 2004. Sven has been involved in several German and EU funded projects, e.g. SWING, ACEGIS, and meanInGS.
Dr. Dumitru Roman works as a researcher at STI Innsbruck (http://www.sti2.at) in the area of semantically enabled service oriented architectures. Since joining DERI he has been involved in several FP5 and FP6 EU funded projects, e.g., SWWS, DIP, SWING, SUPER, etc., in the area of semantic Web and Web services. Before joining DERI Innsbruck, he received a Diploma Engineer in Computer Science from the University of Cluj Napoca, Romania.
