Project Proposed: These collaborative projects, investigating techniques for the creation, deployment, and management cyberinfrastructure for collaborative review of cases of child death, aim to identify strategies to improve children?s safety. In this context, cyberinfrastructure encompasses the tools and services, encapsulated in an IT appliance) needed for capturing, communicating, authoring, viewing, sharing, controlling access to, storing, and conferencing about data and information regarding events resulting in the children?s death. The project builds on an existing functional IT appliance developed for collaborative mechanisms of injury to children in motor vehicle crashes. Enabling its extension, this appliance could quickly be adapted to a more diverse range of causes of death, allowing for different kinds of participants with varying degrees of security and privacy. The work is expected to enrich the presentation of death scenarios for quicker analysis of their causes, leading to more efficient identification of potential prevention strategies. Expected contributions within the research thrusts include techniques for: - Automatic generation of interfaces, integration of components and services, and recovery of domain-specific collaborative IT appliances and - Fine-grained spatio-temporal access-control of shared objects. Broader Impacts: This project addresses a real need for easy-to-use tools that reflect semantics and workflow collaborative activities by non-IT experts as undertaken by professional teams engaged in child death reviews. The project engages graduate students in advanced IT research. Minorities and women will be recruited and encouraged to apply.
TeleCenter is a Web-based application to support research data management and multidisciplinary collaboration. It was developed via a collaboration between the Center for Child Injury Prevention Studies (CChIPS) at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), and the Center for Autonomic Computing (CAC) at the University of Florida. Supported with funding from the National Science Foundation, design specifications were derived through an in-depth understanding of the nature and requirements of in-person collaborative meetings that take place as part of Child Fatality Review (CFR) programs in localities and states. Thses meetings aim to describe the circumstances surrounding child deaths and inform preventive measures. The Telecenter design allowed for local customization by the CFR team leader as well as compatibility on different platforms, security, and integration with third-party software into the appliance. The design also allowed for customizable interfaces and workflow, and the hardening of core infrastructure and software for uninterrupted operation and automated backup and restart. The resulting Telecenter underwent a successful pilot test with a live CFR meeting and is being used to support collaborative research efforts at the University of Florida and The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Intellectual Merit: The research thrusts and the contributions of this project were as follows:(1) Techniques for automatic generation of interfaces, integration of components and services, and recovery of domain-specific collaborative IT appliances; (2) Techniques for fine-grained spatio-temporal access-control of shared objects; (3) Techniques for automated authoring and integration of virtual-reality simulations (of specific fatal events involving children) from static imagery. Broader Impacts: Existing commercially available collaborative tools lack the ability to cost-effectively support domain-specific needs, typically addressing only the communication, content-sharing and interaction needs that are shared by most collaborative efforts. This project addresses a real need for easy-to-use tools that reflect the semantics and workflow of collaborative activities by non-IT experts as undertaken by professional teamss engaged in child -death reviews. The diversity of fatal event circumstances, from motor vehicle crashes to drowning or child abuse, as well as the wide range of participants in the reviews, from clinicians to criminal justice and law enforcement personnel, presents a particular challenge to overcome with the application. This IT appliance has the potential to significantly improve the participation in and cost-efficiency and efficacy of child -death reviews. The project engaged graduate students in advanced IT research as well as exposed them to the challenges of IT adoption and deployment by professionals in other areas.
