Towards Automatic Detection of Missing Referred Documents during Meetings

Business meetings are often informed by and make reference to documents, however not every document that a meeting wishes to consult will already be present. We propose the concept of a smart meeting room capable of detecting when the meeting talks about a document and determining whether that document is already present. We report a preliminary interview-based study into the experience of attending meetings where documents are missing. A subsequent study investigated how observers of meetings are able to judge whether a document being talked about is currently present. This indicates the specific capabilities required by an intelligent assistant system able to detect references to missing documents. We describe an experimental investigation into one such capability involving visually tracking hands and printed documents in a video recording of a meeting. © 2013 Springer International Publishing Switzerland