KMDI - Knowledge Media Design Institute

Knowledge media are building blocks of a knowledge society

• Research Projects

NECTAR: Network for Effective Collaboration Technologies through Advanced Research

NECTAR is a NSERC network of Canada's leading university researchers in human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Participants come from 6 Canadian universities and are world-class experts in these fields. The network is focused on collaboration technologies. Its vision is to investigate technological and social issues to make computer-supported collaboration more efficient, more productive, and more natural.

The goals are:

• To reduce collaboration effort and improve collaboration efficiency in computer-supported cooperative work, based on an understanding of how groups of people really work together;
• To maximize the potential of next-generation interactive technologies for collaborative work;
• To make collaboration at a distance as productive and efficient as working face-to-face, where possible;
• To develop computer-assisted collaboration technologies that augment and surpass traditional ways of working together.