Meetings in smart environments : implications of progressing technology

Meetings are often inefficient. They are numerous and unavoidable. If we look at the technological developments in this area we quickly see that along with the introduction of the microphone and the data projector, the execution of a meeting for the participants has become much easier. Yet there are still many aspects of a meeting that can be improved, where technology in its current stage has not contributed much. There is for instance hardly any technology that is able to autonomously interpret, or analyze, aspects of the meeting process. An automatic analysis of a meeting could provide valuable insights for both the attendants, as well as for those interested parties who could not attend. These insights hypothetically could in turn lead again to more successful meeting processes. It is, for example, often the case that one or two dominant participants can monopolize a complete meeting in a way that they make it impossible for others to contribute. Another example is that the argumentation that has been put forward and that led to a certain decision is often forgotten and lost, not to mention that during a discussion just one line of argumentation can be in the center of attention. It is investigated to what extent the latest technological developments can provide automatic insights into both, so-called higher-level meeting phenomena. To enable the automatic recognition, a descriptive and computationally accessible model has been created for the phenomenon of dominance hierarchy as well as for argument structure. Whereas the model for a dominance hierarchy did not require more than a ranking of the participants, the model that describes the argumentation structure requires interpretation of the individual contributions, as well as the knowledge of how to label contributions in the context of the discussion.