Jonathan J. Cadiz

Distributed meetings: a meeting capture and broadcasting system

The common meeting is an integral part of everyday life for most workgroups. However, due to travel, time, or other constraints, people are often not able to attend all the meetings they need to. Teleconferencing and recording of meetings can address this problem. In this paper we describe a system that provides these features, as well as a user study evaluation of the system. The system uses a variety of capture devices (a novel 360° camera, a whiteboard camera, an overview camera, and a microphone array) to provide a rich experience for people who want to participate in a meeting from a distance. The system is also combined with speaker clustering, spatial indexing, and time compression to provide a rich experience for people who miss a meeting and want to watch it afterward.

Designing and deploying an information awareness interface

The concept of awareness has received increasing attention over the past several CSCW conferences. Although many awareness interfaces have been designed and studied, most have been limited deployments of research prototypes. In this paper we describe Sideshow, a peripheral awareness interface that was rapidly adopted by thousands of people in our company. Sideshow provides regularly updated peripheral awareness of a broad range of information from virtually any accessible web site or database. We discuss Sideshows design and the experience of refining and redesigning the interface based on feedback from a rapidly expanding user community.

Coordination, overload and team performance: effects of team communication strategies

The god of this paper is to iden@ the communication tactics that tiow management teams to successtiy coordinate without becoming overloaded, and to see whether successti coordination and fidom from overload independently Muence team pefiormance. We found that how much teams comnumicatti, what they communicated abou~ and the technologies they used to communicate prdlcted coordination and overload. Team coordination but not overload prdlcted team SUWSS.

Linking public spaces: technical and social issues

Three public spaces frequency used by members of a single organization who are distributed across different floors of two buildings were linked by constantly-running video and audio connections. We discuss the design of the system, including issues in providing low-latency, full-duplex audio-video connectivity, ways to increase possibilities for interaction while addressing privacy concerns, and the introduction of the system to the community. We report on responses to the system and lessions learned, including unexpected issues, such as creative decorations of the spaces and assertions by a vocal minority of employees about the private nature of “public space.”

Automating camera management for lecture room environments

Given rapid improvements in network infrastructure and streaming-media technologies, a large number of corporations and universities are recording lectures and making them available online for anytime, anywhere access. However, producing high-quality lecture videos is still labor intensive and expensive. Fortunately, recent technology advances are making it feasible to build automated camera management systems to capture lectures. In this paper we report on our design, implementation and study of such a system. Compared to previous work-which has tended to be technology centric-we started with interviews with professional video producers and used their knowledge and expertise to create video production rules. We then targeted technology components that allowed us to implement a substantial portion of these rules, including the design of a virtual video director. The systems performance was compared to that of a human operator via a user study. Results suggest that our systems quality in close to that of a human-controlled system. In fact most remote audience members could not tell if the video was produced by a computer or a person.

Viewing meeting captured by an omni-directional camera

One vision of future technology is the ability to easily and inexpensively capture any group meeting that occurs, store it, and make it available for people to view anytime and anywhere on the network. One barrier to achieving this vision has been the design of low-cost camera systems that can capture important aspects of the meeting without needing a human camera operator. A promising solution that has emerged recently is omni-directional cameras that can capture a 360-degree video of the entire meeting. The panoramic capability provided by these cameras raises both new opportunities and new issues for the interfaces provided for post-meeting viewers — for example, do we show all meeting participants all the time or do we just show the person who is speaking, how much control do we provide to the end-user in selecting the view, and will providing this control distract them from their task. These are not just user interface issues, they also raise tradeoffs for the client-server systems used to deliver such content. They impact how much data needs to be stored on the disk, what computation can be done on the server vs. the client, and how much bandwidth is needed. We report on a rototype system built using an omni-directional camera and results from user studies of interface preferences expressed by viewers.

Interaction issues in context-aware intelligent environments

Context-aware intelligent environments are computing systems embedded within physical spaces. They are equipped with input and output computing devices for users and sensors to provide contextual information to the system. These environments provide new challenges to interface designers due to a number of differences from typical desktop computing environments, including the lack of a single focal point for the user, a dynamic set of interaction devices, the sensor-rich nature of the environment, the potential of multiple simultaneous users, and the opportunity for diverse interaction modalities. This essay describes these challenges and focuses on issues involving multiple interaction modalities and automatic system behaviors.

Distance learning through distributed collaborative video viewing

Previous research on Tutored Video Instruction (TVI) shows that learning is enhanced when small groups of students watch and discuss lecture videos together. Using specialized, high-end videoconferencing systems, these improved results have been shown to apply even when the students are in different locations (Distributed TVI, or DTVI). In this paper, we explore two issues in making DTVI-like scenarios widely supported at low cost. First, we explore design of a system that allows distributed individuals to collectively watch video using shared VCR controls such as play, pause, seek, stop. We show how such a system can be built on top of existing commercial technologies. Second, we explore the impact of four alternative discussion channels on student learning and interaction behavior. The four channels-text chat, audioconferencing, videoconferencing, and face-to-face-have differing infrastructure requirements and costs. Our lab studies show that while text chat does not work, there is no significant difference in discussion behavior and learning between audioconferencing and videoconferencing. While lab studies have their limitations and long-term field studies need to be done, the preliminary results point to a low-cost way for a DTVI-like model to be deployed widely in the very near future.

Coming to the wrong decision quickly: why awareness tools must be matched with appropriate tasks

This paper presents an awareness tool designed to help distributed, asynchronous groups solve problems quickly. Using a lab study, it was found that groups that used the awareness tool tended to converge and agree upon a solution more quickly. However, it was also found that individuals who did not use the awareness tool got closer to the correct solution. Implications for the design of awareness tools are discussed, with particular attention paid to the importance of matching the features of an awareness tool with a workgroups tasks and goals.

Exploring PC-telephone convergence with the enhanced telephony prototype

Industry trends suggest that the PC and telephone user experiences will converge over the next several years. This convergence raises important questions for the HCI community: how should the PC-phone user experience be designed, and how does PC-phone technology affect work practices? This paper focuses on the first question and provides some initial data on the second question. We describe a PC-phone prototype we built called Enhanced Telephony, and we report data from an eight month field deployment of Enhanced Telephony within our company where over 7,000 people installed the prototype. Results indicate that PC-phone software is a promising technology for the workplace and that the most valuable features may be those that help people manage their incoming calls.