The Neem Platform: An Evolvable Framework for Perceptual Collaborative Applications

Abstract

Abstract. The Neem Platform is a research test bed for Project Neem, concerned with the development of socially and culturally aware collaborative systems in a wide range of domains, through development of situated applications that target specific group cultures and alternative theories. The Neem Platform is a generic (application neutral) component-based framework that provides functionality that facilitates building such collaborative applications. Given the wide variety of target applications, the platform provides more than a closed set of behaviors -it is itself evolvable. Its functionality can be extended and adapted through facilities provided by a coordination mechanism that isolates computation from coordination concerns. Application development on top of this platform is facilitated by reuse of common functionality, as well as from embedded support for Wizard of Oz experiments. A novelty of Project Neem is its focus on the dynamic aspects that characterize group interaction under a Perceptual Interface paradigm. Participants' multimodal interactions such as voice exchanges, textual messages, widget operations and eventually gestures, eye gaze and facial expressions are reified and made available to applications, that apply situated reasoning, using this rich contextual information to dynamically adapt their behavior. The system presents itself multimodally as well, through a set of virtual participants -automated entities that are perceived by human participants as having personalities and emotions, making use of animation and voice generation.

Detection and application of influence rankings in small group meetings

“…Meeting assistants can be thought of as (embodied) pervasive software systems that operate alone or in groups, interact with the users and with other participants, and learn user preferences (see e.g. Project Neem [3]). It is expected that meeting assistants in the future will be used as tools for remote meeting participation.…”

Pro-active meeting assistants: attention please!

“…Meeting assistants have been the topic of research in various projects, e.g., the Neem Project [16,3]. In Neem, a basic premise is that assistance has to be provided along multiple dimensions, including the organizational, but also the social and informational.…”

“…2 Similar to system 1, but instead of displaying messages, continuously displaying a clock. 3 Similar to system 1, but instead of displaying messages, voice samples were played. 4 A combination of system 1, 2 and 3.…”

A Distributed and Parallel Component Architecture for Stream-Oriented Applications

“…Neem [5], DACS [8], Galaxy Communicator [19], OAA [7]) focus on coarser-grained components. These architectures are typically not concerned with supporting concurrency via threads, or exploiting hardware shared memory to provide fast intra-address space communication.…”