I finished writing my phd research plan, it is here (.pdf). The provisional title is Analysing the Impacts of Location-Awareness on Mobile Collaboration

Location-based services recently happened to be one of the new cutting edge technology in Computer Supported Cooperative Work. This project focuses on its collaborative uses: how group of people benefits from knowing others whereabouts when working together on a joint activity. For that matter, we plan to design a collaborative mobile environment in which we will test how a location awareness tool modifies the group interactions and communications, the way they perform a joint task as well as how they rely on this spatial information to coordinate. Series of experiments will be ran on this platform so that we could figure out how location awareness impacts group collaboration. We also aim at developing a computational model in the form of a XML framework to describe groups interactions in space. This model will enable the analysis and parsing of the data collected so that we could find and visualize patterns, do comparisons and explicitly represents which spatial features are meaningful and relevant for mobile collaboration. From all the results, this PhD will put forward guidelines for the design of efficient location-based services. This proposal emerges from previous research in virtual environment that show the importance of location information in group collaboration.