Heather Richter

A team collaboration space supporting capture and access of virtual meetings

In this paper, we address the design issues of a collaborative workspace system, called TeamSpace, that supports geographically distributed teams by managing shared work processes and maintaining shared artifacts in a project. TeamSpace attempts to integrate both synchronous and asynchronous types of team interaction into a task-oriented environment. Since meetings are an integral part of teamwork, our current work focuses on supporting virtual meetings as part of a larger collaborative work process. We present an initial TeamSpace prototype that supports asynchronous meeting management seamlessly integrated with capture and access of synchronous distributed meetings. The captured synchronous data is integrated with other related information in TeamSpace, enabling users to efficiently gain knowledge of both current and past team activities.

Integrating Meeting Capture within a Collaborative Team Environment

Meeting capture has been a common subject of research in the ubiquitous computing community for the past decade. However, the majority of the research has focused on technologies to support the capture but not enough on the motivation for accessing the captured record and the impact on everyday work practices based on extended authentic use of a working capture and access system. Our long-term research agenda is to build capture services for distributed workgroups that provide appropriate motivation and further understand how access of captured meetings impacts work practices. To do this, we have developed a testbed for meeting capture as part of a larger distributed work system called TeamSpace. In this paper, we discuss the requirements for meeting capture within TeamSpace, describe the initial prototype developed, and report on initial usage.

Formalizing and integrating the dynamic model within OMT

The Object Modeling Technique (OMT), a commonly used object-oriented development technique, comprises the object, dynamic, and functional models to provide three complementary views that graphically describe different aspects of systems. The lack of a well-defined semantics for the integration of the three models hinders the overall development process, particularly during the design phase. Previously, we formalized the object model in terms of algebraic specifications. However, the algebraic specifications only capture the static, structural aspects of a system. They do not explicitly describe the behavior, which is critical for system development, especially for the design phase. It is necessary to formalize the dynamic model in terms of the structural descriptions in order to specify and verify the system behavior using rigorous techniques. This paper presents a well-defined formal model for both the object and dynamic models and their integration. The formal model is described in terms of a well-known specification language, LOTOS. Formalization of the graphical notation enables numerous automated processing and analysis tasks, such as behavior simulation and consistency checks between levels of specifications.

Towards a Smarter Meeting Record--Capture and Access of Meetings Revisited

Multimedia records of meetings contain a rich amount of project information. However, finding detailed information in a meeting record can be difficult because there is no structural information other than time to aid navigation. In this paper we survey and discuss various ways of indexing meeting records by categorizing existing approaches along multiple dimensions. We then introduce the notion of creating indices based upon user interaction with domain-specific artifacts. As an example to illustrate the use of domain-specific artifacts to create meaningful pointers into the meeting record, we describe capture and access in a prototype system that supports general meeting artifacts.

Making multimedia meeting records more meaningful

Meetings contain a large amount of rich project information that is often not documented. Capturing audio and video of a meeting can provide a comprehensive meeting record. However, finding detailed information in that record can be challenging because there is no structural information other than time to help the user navigate. This paper surveys various ways of creating indices into meeting records and introduces the notion of creating indices based upon user interaction with domain-specific artifacts. As an example, we present a prototype system that uses general team artifacts to provide meaningful pointers into the meeting record.

Devices for sharing thoughts and affection at a distance

Interpersonal communication involves more than just words. Many forms of communication involve physical acts showing warm thoughts and affection, such as giving flowers or displaying photos. Yet these forms of personal communication are difficult at a distance. In this paper, we describe the concept of devices for communicating affection and thoughts from a distance. We detail two devices that we are exploring to support many of these physical interpersonal interactions-an augmented candy dispenser and a digital picture frame-and discuss design issues we have encountered as we investigate this interesting application space.

Enabling inter-company team collaboration

Collaboration across different companies at different geographical locations has become a business necessity. We are building a system called TeamSpace that integrates different types of collaboration technologies into an environment that supports inter-company teams. Enabling inter-company collaboration is still a challenge because security infrastructures are in place to prevent the flow of information. We report our experiences in using existing technologies to enable the inter-company collaboration of our own project team. We describe our initial approaches to the problem and explain why they failed. Based on the lessons learned, we built a TeamSpace prototype using an architecture that allowed us to collaborate across existing security infrastructures.

A proposed curriculum for an undergraduate software engineering degree

We have developed a curriculum for a software engineering undergraduate degree. We used the medical school clinical model to guide our design as it successfully combines both knowledge and practice components. Through rotations, our curriculum will provide graduates with both an advanced knowledge of software engineering concepts and practical skills that have been honed in a realistic setting. We present our proposed curriculum and the difficulties we foresee in implementing it.

Indexing unstructured activities with peripheral cues

A variety of ubiquitous computing systems have been built to automatically capture everyday activities in a number of domains. Many capture systems record streams of information that structure and form indices into the recording, providing users easy access to portions of interest. But this is challenging in very unstructured situations or unpredictable environments. In this paper, we explore introducing structure into the activity through the use of an artificial, unrelated, peripheral stream of information. We investigate the feasibility of this idea by integrating a stream of images into an existing meeting capture system. Our study suggests that this technique may be used effectively in some situations, and reveals similar methods of capturing and using indices that could be explored.

Understanding meeting capture and access

Meeting capture has been a common subject of research in the ubiquitous computing community for the past decade. However, the majority of the research has focused on technologies to support the capture but not enough on the motivation for accessing the captured record and the impact on everyday work practices based on extended authentic use of a working capture and access system. Our long-term research agenda is to build capture services for distributed workgroups that provide appropriate motivation and to further understand how access of captured meetings impacts work practices. To do this, we have developed a testbed for meeting capture as part of a larger distributed work system called TeamSpace. We will put this system into real use in a variety of settings.