Meetings and meeting modeling in smart environments

Abstract

In this paper we survey our research on smart meeting rooms and its relevance for augmented reality meeting support and virtual reality generation of meetings in real time or off-line. The research reported here forms part of the European 5th and 6th framework programme projects multi-modal meeting manager (M4) and augmented multi-party interaction (AMI). Both projects aim at building a smart meeting environment that is able to collect multimodal captures of the activities and discussions in a meeting room, with the aim to use this information as input to tools that allow real-time support, browsing, retrieval and summarization of meetings. Our aim is to research (semantic) representations of what takes place during meetings in order to allow generation, e.g. in virtual reality, of meeting activities (discussions, presentations, voting, etc.). Being able to do so also allows us to look at tools that provide support during a meeting and at tools that allow those not able to be physically present during a meeting to take part in a virtual way. This may lead to situations where the differences between real meeting participants, human-controlled virtual participants and (semi-) autonomous virtual participants disappear.

Virtual meeting rooms: from observation to simulation

“…The Human Media Interaction (HMI) group of the University of Twente is one of the AMI partners (Nijholt et al 2004). The HMI group has a tradition in research into interaction with embodied conversational agents, computer graphics for virtual environments and machine learning techniques for recognition of higher level features (e.g., dialogue acts, gestures and emotions) from lower level features (e.g., words, hand movements and facial features).…”

Overt or subtle? Supporting group conversations with automatically targeted directives

“…Research in the area of smart meeting systems provides another set of examples of technologies that act to support participants in meetings by automatically analyzing the group behavior [15,20]. For example, Pianesi et al [18] have shown that multimodal information from meeting participants can be used to model the group dynamics and to generate post-activity summary reports that can help participants to improve their awareness on the meeting performance.…”

Making Task Models and Dialog Graphs Suitable for Generating Assistive and Adaptable User Interfaces for Smart Environments

“…In the context of our work, we strive to develop an application to be operated in a smart meeting room (smart lab in our university). Smart meeting rooms are a specific subset of smart environments where the main goal is the beneficial exchange of information among the resident users (Nijholt et al, 2004). Several requirements have to be fulfilled by the desired application in order to achieve the optimal conceivable assistive system which then leads to the user's satisfaction with the environment.…”