Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Collaboration and Communications
When the Human Genome Project started in 1990, Web browsers hadn't been invented, cell phones
were lunchkit-sized luxury items, the volume of e-mail was a distant fourth behind telephone, fax,
and surface mail communications, and academic journal publishers expected printed manuscripts for
submissions. Even the National Library of Congress didn't recognize electronic documents as
copyrightable material.
Today, e-mail competes head-on with surface mail and the telephone as a means of communications
in business and academia. Networks support real-time collaboration between researchers distributed
around the globe, and academic publishing revolves around timely e-mail submissions. Cell phone
and personal digital assistants (PDAs) are not only everyday business tools, but they're fashion items
for high-school and college students. As another indicator of the shift in perception of the increased
worth of electronic communications, the National Library of Congress changed its policy on electronic
documents and accepted the first copyright application for an electronic topic—this author's
The
Hitchhikers' Guide to the Wireless Web
—in July of 2001.
Engineers commonly characterize electronic communications as either asynchronous or synchronous.
Fax, e-mail, streaming video, online journals, bulletin boards, newsgroups, and voicemail are forms
of asynchronous communications. Synchronous or real-time communications includes the use of the
telephone, instant messaging, chat rooms, and videoconferencing. Regardless of whether it's
synchronous or asynchronous, communications implies that there is a common language—or at least
a common intermediary language—and that there is a communications channel between sender and
receiver with a bandwidth that is compatible with the data transfer rate requirements. There is also
an underlying assumption that the communication is of reasonable quality, in terms of signal-to-noise
ratio, and that the data contained in the communication is valuable to the recipient. For example,
computer-based real-time videoconferencing requires a relatively high-bandwidth communications
channel, such as a connection to the Internet via DSL, cable modem, or Ethernet, and the computer
hardware to support the transmission and reception of data with a reasonably short time delay (
T)
D
of up to a few hundred milliseconds between the sender and the receiver.
Electronic communication is essential to most R&D activities in bioinformatics. However, collaboration
is even more valuable. Collaboration—the act of working in a group to achieve a common
goal—follows the basic model defined in
Figure 10-1
, but is much more focused and interactive than
simple communications. As illustrated in
Figure 10-2
, collaboration builds upon a communications
infrastructure. In order to achieve the common goal, there is a real or virtual place for collaborators
to work and share perspectives, to view common work, and to interactively evaluate and critique
each others' contributions to achieving the goal.
Figure 10-1. Collaboration and Communications Model. The time delay (
D
T),
which is a function of the system design and bandwidth, defines the level of
communications and collaboration possible.
