Multimodal support to group dynamics

Abstract

The complexity of group dynamics occurring in small group interactions often hinders the performance of teams. The availability of rich multimodal information about what is going on during the meeting makes it possible to explore the possibility of providing support to dysfunctional teams from facilitation to training sessions addressing both the individuals and the group as a whole. A necessary step in this direction is that of capturing and understanding group dynamics. In this paper, we discuss a particular scenario, in which meeting participants receive multimedia feedback on their relational behaviour, as a first step towards increasing self-awareness. We describe the background and the motivation for a coding scheme for annotating meeting recordings partially inspired by the Bales' Interaction Process Analysis. This coding scheme was aimed at identifying suitable observable behavioural sequences. The study is complemented with an experimental investigation on the acceptability of such a service.

Predicting online lecture ratings based on gesturing and vocal behavior

“…Research efforts targeted a wide spectrum of problems, including conflict detection [28], communication dynamics [7,25], mimicry measurement [10], early detection of developmental and cognitive diseases [37], role recognition [38], prediction of negotiation outcomes [9], videosurveillance [4,5,6,8], etc. Furthermore, several works were dedicated to the automatic prediction of traits likely to be relevant in a teaching context like, in particular, personality [21,23,30] and dominance [13,27,34,35].…”

“…In [30], Support Vector Machines (SVM) classify audio and video feature vectors (including mean of pitch, energy and spectral entropy, fidgeting, etc.) into classes accounting for two personality traits (extraversion and locus of control).…”

Privacy-sensitive recognition of group conversational context with sociometers

“…Social inference machines could be part of relevant applications including self-assessment, training, and educational tools [37], and of systems to support offline [41] and online group collaboration [7]. As the expectations on individuals and groups are different in different contexts, automatic perception estimators could benefit from the knowledge of the type of interaction.…”

“…Both supporting interacting groups offline and building social inference machines would also benefit from knowing about the group interaction context [41]. Various social factors related to individual attributes (e.g.…”

Human Behavior Understanding for Inducing Behavioral Change: Application Perspectives

“…Some recent works have attempted at exploring these ideas by devising systems that present members of a working group with information about their own social behavior, with the goal of changing it and making it more conducive to better group dynamics [16,33,47,56]. Moreover, an interesting and recent work [1] tested an experimental intervention for inducing changes in fitnessrelated, physical activities and habits.…”