Learning About Meetings

Most people participate in meetings almost every day, multiple times a day. The study of meetings is important, but also challenging, as it requires an understanding of social signals and complex interpersonal dynamics. Our aim this work is to use a data-driven approach to the science of meetings. We provide tentative evidence that: i) it is possible to automatically detect when during the meeting a key decision is taking place, from analyzing only the local dialogue acts, ii) there are common patterns in the way social dialogue acts are interspersed throughout a meeting, iii) at the time key decisions are made, the amount of time left in the meeting can be predicted from the amount of time that has passed, iv) it is often possible to predict whether a proposal during a meeting will be accepted or rejected based entirely on the language (the set of persuasive words) used by the speaker

Interpreting Models of Social Group Interactions in Meetings with Probabilistic Model Checking

A major challenge in Computational Social Science consists in modelling and explaining the temporal dynamics of human communication. Understanding small group interactions can help shed light on sociological and social psychological questions relating to human communications. Previous work showed how Markov rewards models can be used to analyse group interaction in meeting. We explore further the potential of these models by formulating queries over interaction as probabilistic temporal logic properties and analysing them with probabilistic model checking. For this study, we analyse a dataset taken from a standard corpus of scenario and non-scenario meetings and demonstrate the expressiveness of our approach to validate expected interactions and identify patterns of interest

Remote work culture in IT companies : An innovative way or working and living

The purpose of this thesis is to study how remote working companies operate and analyse what kind of positive and negative aspects the method has. This study also discusses why remote working is a fast-growing trend especially in IT companies. This project was carried out while working as UI/UX designer for five months in an IT remote company called MarsBased in Barcelona, Spain. The observations of this thesis are partly based on the author’s own experiences during the internship. The result of this project is an analysis on why MarsBased can be said to be one of the best remote working companies in Spain. The results include two designs that the author of this study created while remote working for the company as well as the pros and cons of remote work. Based on this study it can be concluded the big impact that remote working has created in the professional and personal life of the employees in an IT company. In future studies it would be interesting to analyse how remote working as a method affects employees’ personal and professional life in the long term. New techniques such as virtual reality enable remote working quite effectively. Most companies that have experimented with remote working will continue doing so

Processamento de fala e linguagem para auxiliar na coordenação de reuniões

Meetings are an important part of our daily lives. Formal or informal, in-person or remote, they are something unavoidable in our society. In companies they assume even greater importance, being decisive for the definition of their present and future. Despite being an extremely important area, not enough research has been carried out to understand and improve the quality of meetings. Current technologies can enhance understanding of the meeting, by providing data with greater precision and/or that was simply not possible before. This dissertation proposes a platform that can help coordinate a meeting in real-time, providing relevant information for the coordinator and all participants. To develop a proof-of-concept system, a user-centered Design approach was adopted, starting with the identification of target users and the set of main requirements derived from usage scenarios. The developed system adopted a decoupled architecture and a semantic knowledge base to provide flexibility for future evolutions. The proof-of-concept integrates several processing modules capable of converting speech to text and doing voice analysis. A set of existing pre-recorded meetings was used to test it. The presented system showed to be already capable of providing meeting managers with useful and interesting information. It can extract a set of statistics and present them in the form of charts or text. These are available through a dashboard or an alert module. The presented work is both a first step and an initial proof-of-concept, the future work is rich and covers distinct lines of research.As reuniões são uma parte importante do nosso dia a dia. Formais ou informais, presenciais ou remotas, são algo inevitável na nossa sociedade. Nas empresas assumem uma importância ainda maior, sendo decisivas para a definição do seu presente e futuro. Apesar de ser uma área de extrema importância, não foi ainda realizada investigação suficiente para compreender e melhorar a qualidade das reuniões. As tecnologias atuais podem melhorar a nossa compreensão das reuniões, fornecendo dados com maior precisão e/ou que simplesmente não eram possíveis antes. Esta dissertação propõe uma plataforma que pode ajudar a coordenar uma reunião em tempo real, fornecendo informações relevantes para o coordenador e todos os participantes. Para desenvolver o sistema, uma abordagem centrada no utilizador foi adotada, começando com a identificação dos utilizadores-alvo e o conjunto de requisitos derivados dos cenários de uso. O sistema desenvolvido adotou ainda uma arquitetura desacoplada e uma semantic knowledge base para fornecer flexibilidade para futuras evoluções. A prova de conceito integra vários módulos de processamento capazes de converter fala em texto e realizar análise da voz. Um conjunto de reuniões pré-gravadas foi usado para testar o sistema. O sistema apresentado mostrou já ser capaz de fornecer aos coordenadores de reuniões informações úteis e interessantes. Pode extrair um conjunto de estatísticas e apresentá-las na forma de gráficos ou texto. Estes estão disponíveis numa dashboard ou através de alertas. O trabalho apresentado é um primeiro passo e uma primeira prova de conceito. O trabalho futuro é rico e cobre distintas linhas de investigação.Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e Telemátic

Energy-aware Occupancy Scheduling

Buildings are the largest consumers of energy worldwide. Within a building, heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems consume the most energy, leading to trillion dollars of electrical expenditure worldwide each year. With rising energy costs and increasingly stringent regulatory environments, improving the energy efficiency of HVAC operations in buildings has become a global concern. From a short-term economic point-of-view, with over 100 billion dollars in annual electricity expenditures, even a small percentage improvement in the operation of HVAC systems can lead to significant savings. From a long-term point-of-view, the need of fostering a smart and sustainable built environment calls for the development of innovative HVAC control strategies in buildings. In this thesis, we look at the potential for integrating building operations with room booking and occupancy scheduling. More specifically, we explore novel approaches to reduce HVAC consumption in commercial buildings, by jointly optimising the occupancy scheduling decisions (e.g. the scheduling of meetings, lectures, exams) and the building’s occupancy-based HVAC control. Our vision is to integrate occupancy scheduling with HVAC control, in such a way that the energy consumption is reduced, while the occupancy thermal comfort and scheduling requirements are addressed. We identify four unique research challenges which we simultaneously tackle in order to achieve this vision, and which form the major contributions of this thesis. Our first contribution is an integrated model that achieves high efficiency in energy reduction by fully exploiting the capability to coordinate HVAC control and occupancy scheduling. The core component of our approach is a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model which optimally solves the joint occupancy scheduling and occupancy-based HVAC control problem. Existing approaches typically solve these subproblems in isolation: either scheduling occupancy given conventional control policies, or optimising HVAC control using a given occupancy schedule. From a computation standpoint, our joint problem is much more challenging than either, as HVAC models are traditionally non-linear and non-convex, and scheduling models additionally introduce discrete variables capturing the time slot and location at which each activity is scheduled. We find that substantial reduction in energy consumption can be achieved by solving the joint problem, compared to the state of the art approaches using heuristic scheduling solutions and to more naïve integrations of occupancy scheduling and occupancy-based HVAC control. Our second contribution is an approach that scales to large occupancy scheduling and HVAC control problems, featuring hundreds of activity requests across a large number of offices and rooms. This approach embeds the integrated MILP model into Large Neighbourhood Search (LNS). LNS is used to destroy part of the schedule and MILP is used to repair the schedule so as to minimise energy consumption. Given sets of occupancy schedules with different constrainedness and sets of buildings with varying thermal response, our model is sufficiently scalable to provide instantaneous and near-optimal solutions to problems of realistic size, such as those found in university timetabling. The third contribution is an online optimisation approach that models and solves the online joint HVAC control and occupancy scheduling problem, in which activity requests arrive dynamically. This online algorithm greedily commits to the best schedule for the latest activity requests, but revises the entire future HVAC control strategy each time it considers new requests and weather updates. We ensure that whilst occupants are instantly notified of the scheduled time and location for their requested activity, the HVAC control is constantly re-optimised and adjusted to the full schedule and weather updates. We demonstrate that, even without prior knowledge of future requests, our model is able to produce energy-efficient schedules which are close to the clairvoyant solution. Our final contribution is a robust optimisation approach that incorporates adaptive comfort temperature control into our integrated model. We devise a robust model that enables flexible comfort setpoints, encouraging energy saving behaviors by allowing the occupants to indicate their thermal comfort flexibility, and providing a probabilistic guarantee for the level of comfort tolerance indicated by the occupants. We find that dynamically adjusting temperature setpoints based on occupants’ thermal acceptance level can lead to significant energy reduction over the conventional fixed temperature setpoints approach. Together, these components deliver a complete optimisation solution that is efficient, scalable, responsive and robust for online HVAC-aware occupancy scheduling in commercial buildings

Performing social work : an ethnographic study of talk and text in a metropolitan social services department

The central theme of this ethnographic study is captured in the word play in the title. Itis, essentially, an analysis of the social work in social work. With a primary focus onthe collegial discourse taking place between 'child care' social workers and managers ina social services department in the North West of England, I have undertaken ananalysis of naturally occurring talk, interview data, formal policy and procedure, andwritten records of action taken (case files and minutes) and action to be taken (e.g. courtreports, strategic planning documents). My analytic focus has been upon on the routinesand linguistic practices through which `caseness' is accomplished. I argue that, althoughprofessional accounts are artfully produced against certain (situated) backgroundexpectancies, the 'materials' invoked in such accounts are not entirely local phenomena.That is to say, competent accounts are both locally accomplished and contingent uponavailable vocabularies. In a search for analytic adequacy, I have drawn particularly uponthe temporal and rhetorical 'turns' in the human sciences. Using an unashamedlyeclectic approach, I argue that 'imported' materials, such as bureaucratic time, remainmalleable and, thus, may be invoked strategically and artfully by social workers in their(narrative) constructions of events and 'cases' and, indeed, themselves - allowing themto reference risk, deviance or normality, for example. However, the possibilities are farfrom infinite, and the liturgical nature of many encounters ensures that what is mostremarkable about organizational life is not its instability, but its predictability