Context Aware Middleware for supporting Idea Generation Meetings in Smart Decision Rooms

Carlos Filipe Freitas a,b, António Meireles a, Lino Figueiredo a,b, João Barroso c, Carlos Ramos a,b

a) GECAD – Knowledge Engineering and Decision Support Group at ISEP b) ISEP - Institute of Engineering – Polytechnic of Porto, Porto, Portugal

c) UTAD - Universidade de Trás os Montes e Alto Douto, Apartado 1013, Vila Real, Portugal

Abstract—In a globalized world members of groups may be anywhere, and the need for ubiquitous Idea Generation emerged. This led to two main needs: the creation of Smart Decision Rooms prepared for this new reality and following the Ambient Intelligence paradigm; and the creation of context aware middle-ware. This paper describes OLAVAmI a context aware middle-ware system which was tested in LAID environment, a Smart Meeting Room. OLAVAmI allows video production focusing on the speaker, an audio-to-text conversion service, and the multimedia database of meetings produced in an autonomous way. To experiment OLAVAmI usage and functionalities one of the tools present in LAID test bed was used and the results are presented in this article.

Keywords— Smart Meeting Rooms; context aware middleware; Ambient Intelligence

I. Introduction The increasing competitiveness present in the business

world led people and organizations to take decisions in a short period of time, in a formal group setting, in specific spaces (e.g. meeting rooms) and supported by systems that support distributed and asynchronous meetings, naturally allowing an ubiquitous use that can add flexibility to the global organizational environment of today [1]. Such competitiveness demands for more flexibility and agility is also due to the short time-to-market for new products and services. This demand can be seen by the growing of an agile generation of managers who use new tools that like Social Networking and Virtual environments for competitive business. [2]

In parallel, Ambient Intelligent (AmI) concept is emerging and maturing as can be seen by the emerged wide range of applications in different areas [3][4] in past years and also by the proposal of general architectures like [5], referring that a general architecture of Environments that follow the Ambient Intelligence is composed by an intelligent layer and an operational layer. The Operational layer is composed by reliable sensing information, and actuation capabilities, such as raw sensors, sensors nets, GPS, Robots, communications or databases, etc. The Intelligent layer must incorporate AI methods and techniques and the tasks reserved to this Intelligent Layer are: Interpret the environment’s state; represent the information and knowledge associated with

the environment; model/simulate/represent entities in the environment; learning about the environment and associated aspects; interact with humans; and the fundamental acting on the environment.

Anind Dey defines context as any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity [6]. Context Awareness is one of the most desired concepts to include in Ambient Intelligence, the identification of the context is important for deciding to act in an intelligent way. Context Awareness means that the system has conscience about the current situation we are dealing with.

In this article we will start by exposing Smart Meeting Rooms projects present in literature giving a bigger focus to LAID environment details. We then present a context aware middle-ware for audio/video capture and editing. We then present some experiments we’ve conducted in an intelligent layer system that supports groups of people in Idea Generations Meetings, making use of the proposed middle-ware system.

II. Smart Meeting Rooms (SMR) Intelligent or Smart Meeting Rooms (SMR) are

environments that should support efficient and effective interactions among their occupants. SMR generic goal is normally referred as a system that supports multi-person interactions in the environment in real time, but also as a system that is able to remember the past, enabling review of past events and the reuse of past information in an intuitive, efficient and intelligent way [7]. Besides this classical definition, in reference [8] it is said that SMR should also support the decision making process considering the emotional factors of the intervenient participants, as well as the argumentation process. So from this last definition we can say that SMR spaces will have to understand what is going on in the meetings and even what participants are discussing.

In the field we can find interesting projects. Reference [9] has a good survey on existing SMR projects. Here we present some of the most important. SMaRT [10] is intended to provide meeting support services that do not require explicit human-computer interaction, enabling the room to react appropriately to users’ needs maintaining the focus on their own goals. It supports human-machine, human-human, and human-computer-human interactions

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DOI 10.1109/U-MEDIA.2011.24

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providing multimodal and fleximodal interfaces for multilingual, and multicultural meetings.

Literature also refers M4 (Multi Modal Meeting Manager) project as a large-scale project funded by the European Union in its 5th Framework Programme [11]. M4 aim is to design a meeting manager that is able to translate the information that is captured from microphones and cameras into annotated meeting minutes that are allowed for high-level retrieval questions, as well as summarization and browsing. It is concerned with the building of a demonstration system to enable structuring, browsing, and querying of an archive of automatically analyzed meetings.

There is also AMI (Augmented Multi-party Interaction) project [11] concerned with new multimodal technologies to support human interaction, in the context of smart meeting rooms and remote meeting assistants. It aims to enhance the value of multimodal meeting recordings and to make human interaction more effective in real time.

The tests performed to evaluate our proposal were performed on LAID (Laboratory of Ambient Intelligence for Decision Support) a SMR that has been developed in GECAD research center [12] [8]. This smart meeting room is an Intelligent Environment to support decision making meetings [12][13][9] and supports distributed and asynchronous meetings, so participants can participate in the meeting where ever they are. The software included is part of an ambient intelligence environment for decision making where networks of computers, information and services are shared [9]. In these software applications emotions handling as well as personality are also included. The middleware used is in line with the live participation/supporting of the meeting and it is also able to support the past review. The way this support is given will be explored more ahead with the following hardware: an Interactive 61’’ plasma screen, Interactive holographic screen, Mimio® Note grabber, Six interactive 26’’ LCD screens, each one for 1 to 3 persons (red), 3 cameras, Microphones and activating terminals controlled by a CAN network. With this hardware it is possible to gather all kind of data produced on the meeting, and facilitate their presentation to the participants, minimizing the middleware issues to the software solutions that intend to catalog, organize and distribute the meeting information.

At the software level LAID is equipped with a system that supports the decision making process. Particularly this system supports persons in group decision making processes considering the emotional factors of the intervenient participants, as well as the argumentation process. The modules that compose this SMR are the following: IGTAI, WebMeeting Plus, ABS4GD, WebABS4GD, and the pervasive hardware already referred.

These tools mainly IGTAI and WebMeeting Plus where lacking in the audio and video support they were capable to give. To fill this gap we develop a pervasive system, that will be described in the current article, named OLAVAmI, allows that LAID tools [14][9] have the possibility to work more independently and in a more effective way, introducing produced multimedia contents and enhancing the users’ capabilities with an improved past memory.

Video content is produced in an autonomous way because the system is able to autonomously perceive who is the speaker and points the best unused camera to him. Then an automatic conversion of audio to text feature will allow by one hand to easily introduce the input data in the tools and by the other hand the tools will be able to request to OLAVAmI key moments of meetings in audio and video format. Ambient Intelligence concept is achieved, because the SMR is able to perceive who is talking; it is able to gather multimedia content; on the top of that content is produced more useful information that will be used as input of intelligent systems which by themselves are able to reason on such information and provide relevant knowledge to the users.

On the following subsections we will detail more about LAID modules.

A. IGTAI This is a Multi Agent system developed in GECAD

research centre, which main feature is to support Groups in the process of Decision Making in the idea generation phase. It handles the information generated by the Group in terms of Ideas, Alternatives and Criteria in a tree structure based on brainstorming and mind Mapping. Concerning the group support it follows the brainstorming rules, however, the Issue Based Information System paradigm can be also introduced, allowing the criticism to an Idea Generation session. In a post-meeting phase this tool allows to review the meeting ideas and some statistics about that meeting. It has two different clients; one to desktops and another to cell phones, both build on java technologies, providing to meeting participants the availability of group memory anywhere they are.

It can be seen as simple tool capable of being used by users with little experience in informatics systems, with group knowledge management, ubiquitous access, user adaptiveness and proactiveness, platform independence and the formulation of a multi – criteria problem at the end of a work session which enables his users to maximize important process gains like, for instance, more information, synergy, learning, stimulation, more objective evaluation and the also minimizes process losses like domination of some members, failure to remember among others.

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presentation capabilities; however, the currently used temporal dimension is considered very important and allows meetings reviews to be focused in meeting key points. The core application also lacks on the point that the amount of metadata produced is limited, a good way to fill this gap is to improve the Knowledge Base with inferable metadata and domain and task ontologies.

The audio to text converter can also be improved with meta-data and once again the domain and task ontologies are desirable. This would allow inferring non-obvious knowledge, improve the visualization, and the interoperability and would allow the system to evolve maintaining the retro-compatibility.

A first step to accomplish such improvements would be the ontology specification proposal that covers the meeting task domain which is an undergoing work. Besides that all other previous limitations already mentioned are in the center of our future work.

Concerning the strengths of the system we can highlight the usage of audio sensing to point the available cameras to the speaker, enabling a production of multimedia data of meeting, focused on the participants, and it also improves the meeting reviews and more intuitive broadcasts sessions that decreases the effort of remote participants to understand who is speaking. With this we will be giving remote participants more time to center the attention on what is being discussed.

OLAVAmI also highly increases the usability of group decision support systems tools present in LAID because it is able to provide the input data necessary to these systems decreasing, once again, the users effort. With the use of OLAVAmI features, it has been demonstrated that the IGTAI usability has increased because the effort to introduce data was decreased due to the audio to text service and when such feature is used key moments of the Idea Generation Meeting are automatically added to the correspondent Ideas/Alternatives nodes. Such a feature is able to improve the review of past meetings because the user is able to watch only the key moments of the meeting or the whole meeting. And for last, distributed meeting participants can also benefit with improved multimedia transmissions that are automatically focused on speakers.

Acknowledgments The authors would like to acknowledge FCT, FEDER,

POCTI, POSI, POCI, POSC, and COMPETE for their support to R&D Projects and GECAD.

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