Mercan Topkara

In case you missed it: benefits of attendee-shared annotations for non-attendees of remote meetings

Corporate meetings are increasingly being held remotely using web technologies. With such remote meetings being recorded and made available after the fact, there is a pressing need for tools to access and utilize these recordings efficiently. Our work explores the utility of using annotations generated by meeting attendees to meet this need. We conducted a controlled lab study to evaluate the benefits of sharing annotations. Attendee-created annotations were shared with non-attendees to assist them on typical information retrieval tasks. Results indicate that (a) non-attendees given access to shared annotations performed about as well as attendees provided with their own and shared annotations, (b) non-attendees were more confident in their responses when they used shared annotations as access cues into the recording than when they directly skimmed the video, and (c) attendees utilized shared annotations more than their own, with similar success and confidence as using their own annotations.

Expediting expertise: supporting informal social learning in the enterprise

In this paper, we present Expediting Expertise, a system designed to provide structured support to the otherwise informal process of social learning in the enterprise. It employs a data-driven approach where online content is automatically analyzed and categorized into relevant topics, topic-specific user expertise is calculated by comparing the models of individual users against those of the experts, and personalized recommendation of learning activities is created accordingly to facilitate expertise development. The systems UI is designed to provide users with ongoing feedback of current expertise, progress, and comparison with others. Learning recommendation is visualized with an interactive treemap which presents estimated return on investment and distance to current expertise for each recommended learning activity. Evaluation of the system showed very positive results.

FALCON: seamless access to meeting data from the inbox and calendar

We present a system that supports seamless access to information contained in recorded meetings from the cornerstone points of a knowledge workers daily life: mailbox and calendar. The solution supports granular search of meeting content from an enterprise email system and automatically displays recordings of meetings related to the message the user is currently viewing. Additionally thumbnail summaries of the meetings are added to the users calendar entries after the meetings have taken place. Lastly our system supports easy sharing of videos associated with recorded meetings through the use of hot-linked thumbnail summaries which can be sent via email.

Visualizing meetings as a graph for more accessible meeting artifacts

This paper focuses on capturing, correlating and visualizing the execution of meetings from the recorded data using a business process management approach. Relevant artifacts that are utilized or generated during a meeting as well as meeting activities are mapped onto a generic meeting data model. The execution of a meeting is then captured as a graph where generated meeting artifacts, participants and meeting tasks are connected. The graph enables faster and structured access to meeting data and gives better insight to the users about the meeting through visualization capability.

The Stability and Usability of Statistical Topic Models

Statistical topic models have become a useful and ubiquitous tool for analyzing large text corpora. One common application of statistical topic models is to support topic-centric navigation and exploration of document collections. Existing work on topic modeling focuses on the inference of model parameters so the resulting model fits the input data. Since the exact inference is intractable, statistical inference methods, such as Gibbs Sampling, are commonly used to solve the problem. However, most of the existing work ignores an important aspect that is closely related to the end user experience: topic model stability. When the model is either re-trained with the same input data or updated with new documents, the topic previously assigned to a document may change under the new model, which may result in a disruption of end users’ mental maps about the relations between documents and topics, thus undermining the usability of the applications. In this article, we propose a novel user-directed non-disruptive topic model update method that balances the tradeoff between finding the model that fits the data and maintaining the stability of the model from end users’ perspective. It employs a novel constrained LDA algorithm to incorporate pairwise document constraints, which are converted from user feedback about topics, to achieve topic model stability. Evaluation results demonstrate the advantages of our approach over previous methods.

Making Enterprise Recorded Meetings Easy to Discover and Share

The prevalence of social content sharing such as video and photo sharing has greatly enhanced information discovery and social interaction over the internet. This has inspired similar efforts within enterprise to encourage collaboration and expertise sharing. Moreover, enterprise web meeting tools increasingly become an important platform for knowledge workers to participate and collaborate remotely. Although these web meetings contain rich enterprise knowledge and are frequently recorded, they are rarely revisited and shared. To encourage enterprise knowledge sharing especially, to facilitate the discovery and sharing of enterprise meetings, we develop an end-to-end enterprise meeting service Agora that manages the full cycle of hosting and sharing recorded web meetings. Agora leverages the functionality of existing enterprise meeting hosting, video sharing and presentation sharing services to build a coherent meeting service. Agora was deployed as a cloud service in a global fortune 500 company which allows its customers to test new collaborative technologies.

Composite Search for Distributed Multimedia Recorded Meetings

To encourage enterprise knowledge sharing especially, to facilitate the discovery and sharing of enterprise meetings, we develop an end-to-end enterprise meeting service called Agora that manages the full cycle of hosting web meetings and sharing multimedia recorded meeting artifacts. In this paper, we focus on Agoras composite search engine that allows users to seamlessly search distributed multimedia meeting artifacts. Agora has been deployed as a cloud service which allows selected IBM customers to test new collaborative technologies on IBMs Smart Cloud platform.

You've got video: increasing clickthrough when sharing enterprise video with email

In this Note we summarize our research on increasing the information scent of video recordings that are shared via email in a corporate setting. We compare two types of email messages for sharing recordings: the first containing basic information (e.g. title, speaker, abstract) with a link to the video; the second with the same information plus a set of video thumbnails (hyperlinked to the segments they represent), which are automatically created by video summarization technology. We report on the results of two user studies. The first one compares the quality of the set of thumbnails selected by the technology to sets selected by 31 humans. The second study examines the clickthrough rates for both email formats (with and without hyperlinked thumbnails) as well as gathering subjective feedback via survey. Results indicate that the email messages with the thumbnails drove significantly higher clickthrough rates than the messages without, even though people clicked on the main video link more frequently than the thumbnails. Survey responses show that users found the email with the thumbnail set significantly more appealing and novel.