Just putting a group of people around a task does not guarantee a real collaboration. In that way, it is necessary to structure activities convey a good collaboration, and with the recent advances in computing and information technologies, we are seeing unprecedented opportunities for increased collaborations among individuals and distributed teams of humans, computer systems and applications, and/or a highly heterogeneous set of computing devices. Computing technologies have continued to evolve from standalone tools, to open systems and from general purpose tools to specialized collaboration grids and infrastructures that facilitate intensive collaboration in multi-organizational settings, as well as in the context of global scale social interactions and work-sharing. Such collaborations are enabling large and globally dispersed organizations to achieve a much higher level of productivity and jointly produce innovative and powerful products that would be impossible to develop without the contributions of multiple collaborators. Novel collaboration solutions that fully realize the promises of electronic collaboration, and pushes the limits of human endeavor, productivity and discovery require innovations and advancements in broad areas of computing including networking, systems and applications, user interfaces and interaction paradigms, and seamless interoperation among system, network and application-specific components and tools. The goal of this special issued is to serve as an international venue for publishing innovative and cutting edge research results in theory as well as applied systems, applications and networking areas that enable intensive and efficient collaboration.
The indicative list of topics of interest for this special issue devoted Collaborative multimedia applications in technology includes, but is not limited to: Frameworks and Methodologies for Collaboration; Collaboration Enabling Technologies; Architectures & Design of Collaboration Systems; Platforms, Artifacts and Tools for Collaboration; Coordination and Cooperation Mechanisms; Interfaces for Collaborative Work; Intelligent, Autonomous and Multi Agents in Collaboration; Cognitive and Psychological Issues in Collaboration; Virtual Communities and Communities of Practice; Group  Characteristics and Social Factors; Ontologies and Ethnographic Approaches; Human-machine Collaboration and Interaction; Awareness in Collaboration Systems; Contextual and Situation-based Collaboration; Visualization of Collaborative Processes &  Applications; Privacy-preserving Collaboration; Grid and Cloud-based Collaboration Environments.