Group Communication

Study how distributed systems could give support to collaborative work carried out by a potentially large number of people, computers networking together, forming a potentially large and widespread community, many times a region of Internet. In other words, the interfaces between components of a distributed system and people are our target topic.

Collaborative services and telematic applications for specific areas of application (education, research, cooperation networks, civic networks) have been studied, designed and validated in a multidisciplinary approach with contributions from education and social sciences as well as computing and networking.

Large scale cooperative networks are subject of particular interest. Services and mechanisms for scaling up and enabling the evolution of a global networking infrastructure such as:

• Federation of autonomous heterogeneous and distributed sources of information,
• Notification and coordination for people, resources or services,
• Optimizing the access to information by distribution and replication,
• Architectures for large scale distributed networks of services and people,
• Services and applications for particular communities.

Pilots in several application areas have been set up: in education with the I*earn educational network, Pangea on cooperation networks, Aleph on large scale networks, Bcnet on civic networks, Intermed on regional networks, Epitelio on social integration networks, among others.

Several workshops and conferences are organized and promoted such as Inet-Cat, Inter-Med, etc. to discuss and disseminate the results of our research with other research groups and the society.

Basic research has been partially funded mainly by several CICYT (ES), COST 14 (EC), and ESPRIT Basic Research (EC) actions.

Applied research has developed in the framework of the above and other projects such as CACTUS (EC), EPITELIO (EC), MSC (EC), among others.

Researchers: Leandro Navarro (Leader), Miquel Colomer, Joan M. Marqués, Claudio E. Righetti, Gerard Rodríguez, María Clara Rozo, Mildred Sarmiento, Artur Serra and Josep Turró.