Automatic Understanding and Real-Time Support for Small Team Meetings (Paperback)

Meetings are important for organisations and a major component in Information Systems research; however, providing computer support for collocated, face-to-face meetings has proven to be an intractable problem for decades. We have a fresh approach where software applications ground their meeting support decisions in real-time, multi modal observation of human interaction rather than prescriptive algorithms. In this book, we present a prototype, extending part of Blackburn's theoretical framework, where data generated from unscripted meetings populate selected theories of human behaviour. Small stories of different parts of the meeting emerge and these are aggregated and interpreted to form a global view of activities. This will allow a computer infrastructure to "understand" what is happening and provide a supportive intervention if required and it also fundamentally changes the way researchers can view meeting support approaches.