Meetings of minds - how technology can help

Sun Oct 22 20:22:14 PDT 2006

Maybe this is a totally off topic question in which acse I apologize: This
is a news release which I have just read from a European technology
information elist. This is of course NOT an Open Space document by any
means. The reason I am posting it is to see the feedback it gets from
everyone as I slowly study and learn about Open Space. I hope you all do not
mind too much.

This seems like a very different kind of approach and I am wondering if it
could supplement OS, or whether it would prevent OS from taking place, or
whether OS would add to or improve this approach. Fairly open questions.
Since I have only ever read about OS and never personally experienced it I
understand that the questions I have may be misplaced.

Thank you to everyone for all the information and support so far. It is
deeply appreciated.

love and peace

isa in istanbul

Meetings of minds - how technology can help 

How do you understand what happens at meetings at which you are not
present?How do you understand what happens at meetings at which you are not
present? The AMI project team set out to find the answer, with a new set of
tools to capture meeting content. 

Mindful of that old adage, "a meeting is where minutes are taken and hours
wasted," the IST project AMI <http://www.amiproject.org/>  (Augmented
Multi-party Interaction) set out to extract the  maximum possible usefulness
from the business meeting - by creating a new method of archiving and
navigating meeting content. 

"Until now, it's been difficult to understand what happened at a meeting you
didn't attend," says AMI project leader Steve Renals of Edinburgh University
in the UK. "Or, if you only need to be present for a part of the meeting
agenda, it's hard to know the right moment to join. We decided to develop
technological applications to solve these problems." 

Capturing meeting content 
AMI, which was launched in January 2004, set out to record business
meetings, using a variety of digital pens, cameras and recorders to "capture
everything that happens when a number of people interact," says Renals. As
such, it draws on an ambitious range of technologies, including human-human
communication modelling, speech recognition, computer vision, and multimedia
indexing and retrieval. 

"We developed a special meetings browser, so that the archived audio and
video data can be navigated in terms of topic, and summary and skim-through
versions can be viewed," Renals adds. "Meeting archives become very useful
when technology can browse them and extract targeted information." 

The team has tested the AMI technology in a series of scenario meetings with
groups of business people. "We controlled what these meetings were actually
about," says Renals. "This gave us plenty of opportunity to evaluate the
technology." 

Despite possible Big-Brother overtones, the AMI team found that people
accepted the technology very readily. "They quickly forgot the microphones,"
comments Renals. "Most people get used to it surprisingly quickly. And there
is an option for review, and you can ask for comments to be scratched from
the record - though I must say that not many people used this option."

A follow-up project will apply webcams and microphones to real-time remote
meetingsExtending to video-conferencing 
With AMI's end-date of December 2006 in sight, the challenge remained of how
to use technology to maximise meetings in real time. With this in mind, the
same team set out to extend AMI into AMIDA (Augmented Multiparty Interaction
with Distance Access), a follow-up project which applies similar technology
- inexpensive webcams and microphones, for example - to real-time remote
meetings. 

The research goals of AMIDA, which kicked off in October 2006 and will run
until September 2009, are extremely ambitious, and are aimed at creating a
new type of video conferencing facility. This new facility will combine
several challenging and usually separate fields, including qualitative human
analysis, audio-video processing, multimodal structure and content analysis,
and HCI. 

"In a telephone conference, people miss the peripheral clues - things like
body language," explains Renals. "So with AMIDA, we're looking at ways of
using information from audio and visual sources to compensate for this -
something that could inform people when participants look bored with a
certain topic, for example. By supplementing the experience, AMIDA could
help to make phone or video conferencing feel more natural, and thereby
encourage people to use it more. And if you just need to be present for a
particular item, then a meeting monitor can inform you when your topic is up
for discussion." 

Generating commercial applications 
Currently, AMI is in the final evaluation phase, with research in the form
of questionnaires aimed at establishing if the technology can actually make
its users more productive. Following evaluation, it is hoped that AMI
features (and later AMIDA tools too) will be incorporated into commercial
applications. 

Renals reports that commercialisation is coming more naturally with AMI and
AMIDA than with many research projects, which all too often find themselves
stranded in the infamous "valley of death". This greater market readiness is
partly due to the involvement of two SMEs - Spiderphone and Visual Nexus -
in the consortium from the start. Philips Consumer Electronics is also
exploring the use of television for video conferencing with AMI/AMIDA
technology. 

"In addition, we have a community of interest composed of companies like
Intel which provide feedback," says Renals. "This makes it easy to calibrate
what we're doing at the research level. We have about twelve companies
involved in the bigger picture. It also helps that several of the academic
partners, including ourselves, have formed spin-off companies in the past." 

Contact: 
Steve Renals 
Centre for Speech Technology Research / School of Informatics 
University of Edinburgh 
2 Buccleuch Place 
Edinburgh EH8 9LW 
United Kingdom 
Tel: +44 131 650 4589 
Fax: +44 131 650 6626 
Email:  <mailto:s.renals at ed.ac.uk> s.renals at ed.ac.uk 

Source: Based on information from AMI. 

Information :

DATE :

20 Oct 2006

TECHNOLOGY AREA:

Knowledge
<http://istresults.cordis.europa.eu/index.cfm?section=news&tpl=search&Browse
scope=browse&Date=ALL&Country=ALL&Technology=502&Markets=ALL&Type=ALL>
management 

<http://istresults.cordis.europa.eu/popup.cfm?section=news&tpl=explanation&i
d=502&catlis=1> 

MARKET APPLICATION:

Administrations
<http://istresults.cordis.europa.eu/index.cfm?section=news&tpl=search&Browse
scope=browse&Date=ALL&Country=ALL&Technology=ALL&Markets=515&Type=ALL>  

<http://istresults.cordis.europa.eu/popup.cfm?section=news&tpl=explanation&i
d=515&catlis=2> 

Electronics/IT
<http://istresults.cordis.europa.eu/index.cfm?section=news&tpl=search&Browse
scope=browse&Date=ALL&Country=ALL&Technology=ALL&Markets=521&Type=ALL>
manuf 

<http://istresults.cordis.europa.eu/popup.cfm?section=news&tpl=explanation&i
d=521&catlis=2> 

Exchange
<http://istresults.cordis.europa.eu/index.cfm?section=news&tpl=search&Browse
scope=browse&Date=ALL&Country=ALL&Technology=ALL&Markets=527&Type=ALL>  of
information 

<http://istresults.cordis.europa.eu/popup.cfm?section=news&tpl=explanation&i
d=527&catlis=2> 

USEFUL LINKS:

AMI project website <http://www.amiproject.org> 
AMI fact sheet on CORDIS
<http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=PROJ_IST&ACTION=D&RCN=71206&DOC=2&CAT=
PROJ&QUERY=1160498449842> 
Related projects researching in this area
<http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=PROJ_IST&QZ_WEBSRCH=+IST-2002-2.3.1.6&
QM_EP_PGT_A=&USR_SORT=EP_PJA_A+CHAR+ASC> 
Information Society Policy Link
<http://europa.eu.int/information_society/activities/policy_link/> 

Legal notice:
The content is prepared by the IST Results service and offers news and views
on innovations, emerging from EU-funded Information Society Research. The
views expressed in the articles have not been adopted or in any way approved
by the European Commission and should not be relied upon as a statement of
the Commission or the Directorate General for Information Society and Media.
If errors are brought to our attention, we will try to correct them.
Reproduction of this article is authorised, provided its source "IST
RESULTS" is acknowledged. 

We do not inherit it; we borrow the Earth from our children: Native American
wisdom. The only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to
do it: Jean
<http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jeananouil148661.html>  Anouilh 

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