Meetings in smart environments : implications of progressing technology

Meetings are often inefficiënt. They are numerous and unavoidable. If we look at the technological developments in this area we quickly see that along with the introduction of the microphone and the data projector, the execution of a meeting for the participants has become much easier. Yet there are still many aspects of a meeting that can be improved, where technology in its current stage has not contributed much. There is for instance hardly any technology that is able to autonomously interpret, or analyze, aspects of the meeting process. An automatic analysis of a meeting could provide valuable insights for both the attendants, as well as for those interested parties who could not attend.\ud These insights hypothetically could in turn lead again to more successful meeting processes. It is, for example, often the case that one or two dominant participants can monopolize a complete meeting in a way that they make it impossible for others to contribute. Another example is that the argumentation that has been put forward and that led to a certain decision is often forgotten and lost, not to mention that during a discussion just one line of argumentation can be in the center of attention.\ud It is investigated to what extent the latest technological developments can provide automatic insights into both, so-called higher-level meeting phenomena. To enable the automatic recognition, a descriptive and computationally accessible model has been created for the phenomenon of dominance hierarchy as well as for argument structure. Whereas the model for a dominance hierarchy did not require more than a ranking of the participants, the model that describes the argumentation structure requires interpretation of the individual contributions, as well as the knowledge of how to label contributions in the context of the discussion

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

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

First Steps Towards the Automatic Construction of Argument-Diagrams from Real Discussions

This paper presents our efforts to create argument structures from meeting transcripts automatically. We show that unit labels of argument diagrams can be learnt and predicted by a computer with an accuracy of 78,52% and 51,43% on an unbalanced and balanced set respectively. We used a corpus of over 250 argument diagrams that was manually created by applying the Twente Argument Schema. In\ud this paper we also elaborate on this schema and we discuss applications and the role we foresee the diagrams to play

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. 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

Detection and Application of Influence Rankings in Small Group Meetings

We address the problem of automatically detecting participant's influence levels in meetings. The impact and social psychological background are discussed. The more influential a participant is, the more he or she influences the outcome of a meeting. Experiments on 40 meetings show that application of statistical (both dynamic and static) models while using simply obtainable features results in a best prediction performance of 70.59\% when using a static model, a balanced training set, and three discrete classes: high, normal and low. Application of the detected levels are shown in various ways i.e. in a virtual meeting environment as well as in a meeting browser system