Meetings and Meeting Modeling in Smart Environments

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

Detecting Low Rapport During Natural Interactions in Small Groups from Non-Verbal Behaviour

Rapport, the close and harmonious relationship in which interaction partners are "in sync" with each other, was shown to result in smoother social interactions, improved collaboration, and improved interpersonal outcomes. In this work, we are first to investigate automatic prediction of low rapport during natural interactions within small groups. This task is challenging given that rapport only manifests in subtle non-verbal signals that are, in addition, subject to influences of group dynamics as well as inter-personal idiosyncrasies. We record videos of unscripted discussions of three to four people using a multi-view camera system and microphones. We analyse a rich set of non-verbal signals for rapport detection, namely facial expressions, hand motion, gaze, speaker turns, and speech prosody. Using facial features, we can detect low rapport with an average precision of 0.7 (chance level at 0.25), while incorporating prior knowledge of participants' personalities can even achieve early prediction without a drop in performance. We further provide a detailed analysis of different feature sets and the amount of information contained in different temporal segments of the interactions.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

Multi-party Interaction in a Virtual Meeting Room

This paper presents an overview of the work carried out at the HMI group of the University of Twente in the domain of multi-party interaction. The process from automatic observations of behavioral aspects through interpretations resulting in recognized behavior is discussed for various modalities and levels. We show how a virtual meeting room can be used for visualization and evaluation of behavioral models as well as a research tool for studying the effect of modified stimuli on the perception of behavior

SALSA: A Novel Dataset for Multimodal Group Behavior Analysis

Studying free-standing conversational groups (FCGs) in unstructured social settings (e.g., cocktail party ) is gratifying due to the wealth of information available at the group (mining social networks) and individual (recognizing native behavioral and personality traits) levels. However, analyzing social scenes involving FCGs is also highly challenging due to the difficulty in extracting behavioral cues such as target locations, their speaking activity and head/body pose due to crowdedness and presence of extreme occlusions. To this end, we propose SALSA, a novel dataset facilitating multimodal and Synergetic sociAL Scene Analysis, and make two main contributions to research on automated social interaction analysis: (1) SALSA records social interactions among 18 participants in a natural, indoor environment for over 60 minutes, under the poster presentation and cocktail party contexts presenting difficulties in the form of low-resolution images, lighting variations, numerous occlusions, reverberations and interfering sound sources; (2) To alleviate these problems we facilitate multimodal analysis by recording the social interplay using four static surveillance cameras and sociometric badges worn by each participant, comprising the microphone, accelerometer, bluetooth and infrared sensors. In addition to raw data, we also provide annotations concerning individuals' personality as well as their position, head, body orientation and F-formation information over the entire event duration. Through extensive experiments with state-of-the-art approaches, we show (a) the limitations of current methods and (b) how the recorded multiple cues synergetically aid automatic analysis of social interactions. SALSA is available at http://tev.fbk.eu/salsa.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure

Roundtable Discussion Examining Ritual, Technology, and Community in Urban Communication

Pervasive technologies that now exist in the urban setting have greatly improved the ability to connect on a macro-level, but have minimized the intimate shared experience of community on a micro level. This paper explores how technology has changed rituals within the global community and has contributed new methods to the process of human interaction. Technology’s influence on civic engagement, business meetings, shopping and socializing are examined to assess the impact technology has on human connections

Disentangling Achievement Orientation and Goal Setting: Effects on Self-Regulatory Processes

Creativity has been underscored as a key factor to organizational adaptability and competitiveness in today\u27s rapidly changing business environment. Designing as well as managing work environments that facilitate creativity have therefore received growing attention, resulting in a multitude of research examining the social-psychological work environment. Few studies, however, have focused on the contribution of the physical work environment to supporting creativity in the workplace. This study focuses on the role of the physical environment in supporting creativity in organizations by identifying specific physical features and attributes of the work environment perceived to promote or inhibit creativity. The research design compares four organizations publicly acclaimed for their innovative social-psychological work environments, but which are distinctly different in terms of the physical work environment. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected by means of survey questionnaires [N = 1 30). Results indicate that the physical work environment exerts indirect influence on creativity by contributing to two significant social-psychological conditions that are conducive to creativity, namely dynamism and freedom. The study specifies attributes of the physical work environment perceived to be positively and negatively associated with both of these conditions

Pro-active Meeting Assistants : Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all

An Interactive Tablecloth for Facilitating Discussion in a Culturally Diverse Group

Group discussions are a useful tool in a number of environments: from working towards a common goal in a business setting, to gathering feedback on an exhibit in a museum for example. One issue in such sessions is that some group members can talk more loudly and confidently than others, making some group members change their mind or keep quiet, this can result in interesting differences of opinion being lost. In this paper we present a tool for facilitating such group discussions. The tool is an interactive tablecloth that is controlled with tangible interfaces, and provides a method for each group member’s voice to be heard prior to discussion, thus preserving the diversity of responses. When tested after an immersive theatre performance, the tool effectively allowed each group member to answer questions individually prior to beginning group discussion. This also allowed the facilitator to effectively coordinate the discussion in an efficient manner