KMi Seminars
What is happening in a meeting?
This event took place on Wednesday 12 December 2007 at 11:30

 
Dr. Nailah Abdullah Honiden Laboratory, Intelligent Research System Division, National Institute of Informatics, Japan

This is an introduction to a proposed collaboration between National Institute of Informatics, Japan and KMi on developing method of analysis and tools for understanding what is happening in a meeting. The long-term goal is to capitalize FlashMeeting for the field of requirement engineering. The rapidly increasing globalization of software industry creates a strong demand to achieve a better understanding of the challenges faced by multi-site software development and to study advanced technologies that successfully support collaborative activities in global software engineering. Software engineers have adopted every mainstream communication technology

such as telephone, teleconferences, email, voice mail, discussion lists, Web, instant messaging, text messaging, video conferences, voice over IP, useful at every stage of a project?s lifecycle. Their main concern during these Web meetings is for analysts to understand ?what is happening in the meeting (for example during videoconferencing meetings)?

FlashMeeting currently provides data analysis of meeting footprints. As a first step towards achieving our goal, we propose further: linking a micro-level analysis to the current data analysis provided by Flashmeeting. We retrieved two different types of naturalistic meetings as benchmark data. We focus firstly on analyzing animation meeting, closely resembling a working/design meeting.

This talk will be divided into two parts. The first part briefly introduces the problems faced by requirement engineers in Japan. The second part concerns the ongoing research with collaborating teams at KMi on analyzing animeetings highlighting the developing method and some results.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.