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

User centred evaluation of a recommendation based image browsing system

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to recommend images by mining user interactions based on implicit feedback of user browsing. The underlying hypothesis is that the interaction implicitly indicates the interests of the users for meeting practical image retrieval tasks. The algorithm mines interaction data and also low-level content of the clicked images to choose diverse images by clustering heterogeneous features. A user-centred, task-oriented, comparative evaluation was undertaken to verify the validity of our approach where two versions of systems { one set up to enable diverse image recommendation { the other allowing browsing only { were compared. Use was made of the two systems by users in simulated work task situations and quantitative and qualitative data collected as indicators of recommendation results and the levels of user's satisfaction. The responses from the users indicate that they nd the more diverse recommendation highly useful

Smart Exposition Rooms: The Ambient Intelligence View

We introduce our research on smart environments, in particular research on smart meeting rooms and investigate how research approaches here can be used in the context of smart museum environments. We distinguish the identification of domain knowledge, its use in sensory perception, its use in interpretation and modeling of events and acts in smart environments and we have some observations on off-line browsing and on-line remote participation in events in smart environments. It is argued that large-scale European research in the area of ambient intelligence will be an impetus to the research and development of smart galleries and museum spaces

Interview with Robert and Esther Fortenbaugh, February 22, 2004

Robert & Esther Fortenbaugh were interviewed on February 22, 2004 by Michael J. Birkner. Esther discussed her early years and Robert discussed his career at American Cyanimid and then as a United Methodist Minister. They both discussed their time at Gettysburg College (including meeting each other), their life after college, and returning to Gettysburg after retirement. Length of Interview: 88 minutes Collection Note: This oral history was selected from the Oral History Collection maintained by Special Collections & College Archives. Transcripts are available for browsing in the Special Collections Reading Room, 4th floor, Musselman Library. GettDigital contains the complete listing of oral histories done from 1978 to the present. To view this list and to access selected digital versions please visit -- http://gettysburg.cdmhost.com/cdm/landingpage/collection/p16274coll

Gathering a corpus of multimodal computer-mediated meetings with focus on text and audio interaction

In this paper we describe the gathering of a corpus of synchronised speech and text interaction over the network. The data collection scenarios characterise audio meetings with a significant textual component. Unlike existing meeting corpora, the corpus described in this paper emphasises temporal relationships between speech and text media streams. This is achieved through detailed logging and time stamping of text editing operations, actions on shared user interface widgets and gesturing, as well as generation of speech activity profiles. A set of tools has been developed specifically for these purposes which can be used as a data collection platform for the development of meeting browsers. The data gathered to data consists of nearly 30 hours of recorded audio and time stamped editing operations and gestures

An evaluation of Bradfordizing effects

The purpose of this paper is to apply and evaluate the bibliometric method Bradfordizing for information retrieval (IR) experiments. Bradfordizing is used for generating core document sets for subject-specific questions and to reorder result sets from distributed searches. The method will be applied and tested in a controlled scenario of scientific literature databases from social and political sciences, economics, psychology and medical science (SOLIS, SoLit, USB Köln Opac, CSA Sociological Abstracts, World Affairs Online, Psyndex and Medline) and 164 standardized topics. An evaluation of the method and its effects is carried out in two laboratory-based information retrieval experiments (CLEF and KoMoHe) using a controlled document corpus and human relevance assessments. The results show that Bradfordizing is a very robust method for re-ranking the main document types (journal articles and monographs) in today’s digital libraries (DL). The IR tests show that relevance distributions after re-ranking improve at a significant level if articles in the core are compared with articles in the succeeding zones. The items in the core are significantly more often assessed as relevant, than items in zone 2 (z2) or zone 3 (z3). The improvements between the zones are statistically significant based on the Wilcoxon signed-rank test and the paired T-Test

Information encountering re-encountered: A conceptual re-examination of serendipity in the context of information acquisition

Purpose In order to understand the totality, diversity and richness of human information behavior, increasing research attention has been paid to examining serendipity in the context of information acquisition. However, several issues have arisen as this research subfield has tried to find its feet; we have used different, inconsistent terminology to define this phenomenon (e.g. information encountering, accidental information discovery, incidental information acquisition), the scope of the phenomenon has not been clearly defined and its nature was not fully understood or fleshed-out. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, information encountering (IE) was proposed as the preferred term for serendipity in the context of information acquisition. Findings A reconceptualized definition and scope of IE was presented, a temporal model of IE and a refined model of IE that integrates the IE process with contextual factors and extends previous models of IE to include additional information acquisition activities pre- and postencounter. Originality/value By providing a more precise definition, clearer scope and richer theoretical description of the nature of IE, there was hope to make the phenomenon of serendipity in the context of information acquisition more accessible, encouraging future research consistency and thereby promoting deeper, more unified theoretical development

The Hypertext Internet Connection: E-mail, Online Search, Gopher

In this paper we show how to handle and organize the large amount of information accessible through the Internet or other public communication networks in a hypertext environment. The C(K)onstance-Hypertext-System (KHS) uses typed units to indicate the differences and the content and structure of information, comprising text, forms, images pointers to external information. We show how to imbed Internet services, which usual require rather different interaction styles, such as point-to-point communication (e-mail query formulation (online databases) or browsing (Gopher) into the uniform interaction model of the KHS. The integration of Internet services in an open hypertext environment produces value-adding effects which are also discussed. (DIPF/Orig.