New Technology Will Help Make The Most Of Meetings

Meetings are an essential part of 21st century business life but many still rely on condensed records taken in shorthand. This can sometimes make it difficult to recall exactly who said what and even the final decisions arrived at. Now new technology has been developed that automatically records and analyses meetings so that an archive can be structured, browsed and queried.

With the help of 1.6 million (euros) from the Information Society Technology (IST) Programme of the European Unions Framework Programme, the Multi-Modal Meeting Manager (M4) project has developed a prototype system that can automatically analyse a meeting in terms of both its structure and content.
The project is centred around a highly-instrumented meeting room where each everyone taking part in the meeting wears a lapel microphone. There is also an array of microphones on the desktop, three closed-circuit TV cameras and a binaural manikin - essentially a dummy head with two microphones placed at each ear to record the sounds a person would actually hear.
"M4 is an ambitious project in which we are developing ways in which computers can understand natural human communication," says Professor Steve Renals, Director of the Centre for Speech Technology Research, University of Edinburgh and scientific coordinator of M4. We are developing smart meeting room technology where we record meetings using multi-channel audio and video. Using the video cameras, the system can track the gestures of individual participants and identify who is speaking at any given instant. Then, based on these recordings we use intelligent multimodal processing to enable users to browse through an archive of meetings, based on what the participants have said and done.
"We also collect interactions with the mouse and keyboard when someone's making a computer-based presentation, and the actual content of the presentation. The challenge is to find a methodology for analysing the mass of information that the system generates. It's one thing to perform automated speech recognition, but most commercially-available systems assume that the input is from a single acoustic source, say someone dictating. In real meetings, however, there are many acoustic sources, with people making comments to one another during presentations, people making 'uh-huh' acknowledgements, and so on."
,The M4 project involves eight leading European laboratories within the UK, Switzerland, Germany, The Netherlands and Czech Republic along with a subcontractor from the USA.
Peter Walters, UK National Contact Point for IST within the EUs Sixth Framework Programme, believes that it was the EU funding that made the M4 project possible: Framework funding is the EUs main method of providing funding for collaborative research and innovation. As more than half of the funding for this project came from the EU's Framework programme it seems fair to assume that it may well not have gone ahead without it. Yet the results of the project will be of help to anyone who needs to keep accurate records of meetings."
The current Framework Programme (FP6) runs until 2006 and organisations wanting free information on how to access some of the 19bn euros available should log on to http://fp6uk.ost.gov.uk or call central telephone support on 0870 600 6080.
Although the M4 project still has a year to run, the technology is already being further developed by an FP6 funded project called AMI (Augmented Multiparty Interaction) which targets computer enhanced multi-modal interaction in the context of meetings. This project aims at substantially advancing the state-of-the-art system, within important underpinning technologies (such as human-human communication modelling, speech recognition, computer vision, multimedia indexing and retrieval). It will also produce tools for off-line and on-line browsing of multi-modal meeting data, including meeting structure analysis and summarizing functions. The project will also make recorded and annotated multimodal meeting data widely available for the European research community, thereby contributing to the research infrastructure in the field.The EU's Framework Programmes are the worlds largest, publicly funded, research and technological development programmes. The Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) covers the period 2002-2006 and is the European Unions main instrument for the funding of collaborative research and innovation. It is open to public and private entities of all sizes in the EU and a number of non-EU countries. It has an overall budget of 19 billion.
Most of the budget for FP6 is devoted to work in seven priority thematic areas:,? Life sciences, Genetics and Biotechnology for Health;,? Information Society Technologies;,? Nanotechnologies and Nanosciences, Knowledgebased Multifunctional Materials and New Production Processes and Devices;,? Aeronautics and Space;,? Food Quality and Safety;,? Sustainable Development, Global Change and Ecosystems; and,? Citizens and Governance in a Knowledge-based Society.
There is also a focus on the research activities of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) across all seven thematic areas.
The services of FP6UK are funded by the Office of Science & Technology (OST) / Department of Trade & Industry (DTI).
More information can be found on http://fp6uk.ost.gov.uk
IST Programme ,The IST Priority Thematic Area (PTA) of the 6th Framework Programme (FP6) is the largest of the seven PTA's - with a budget of 3.822bn over the lifetime of FP6. Over 400 projects will arise from the first and second calls, with call budgets of 1070m and 525m respectively. The 3rd Call for proposals was one of three separate calls in the IST domain that have a closing date of 15 October - including a Joint Call with the Nanotechnologies, Materials and Production technologies area. Further calls for 1bn and 800m are expected late 2004 and mid 2005

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