PFI:BIC: Multimodal-Sensor-Enabled Environments with Advanced Cognitive Computing Enabling Smart Group Meeting Facilitation Services.

在美国，每天都有数以百万计的会议，这给经理和员工的宝贵时间和工资带来了巨大的成本。不幸的是，小组会议面临着严重的问题，这些问题破坏了工作效率和合议性，包括公开或无意识的偏见、“集体思维”、不敢发言和讨论不集中。几乎没有自动化工具可以让会议保持在正轨上，准确地记录谁说了什么，并使小组讨论更有成效。这项研究的目标是设计智能房间，通过识别会议参与者、理解他们的对话、总结讨论并帮助小组高效地完成议程来提供便利服务，所有这些都不需要参与者佩戴麦克风或其他传感器。这项研究将在几个方面产生更广泛的影响。任何让复杂、长期项目的小组会议更有成效、更容易控制的措施，都会立即产生经济影响。促进长期群体互动的服务系统的成功将带来重大的技术转让机会和高度市场化的硬件/软件平台，以便在商业、教育和金融等领域进行合作。该项目将产生新的小组会议数据，供不同领域的研究人员使用，如组织心理学家和计算机科学家。最后，该项目将为研究和教育提供高度可见的基础设施，有可能使公众更多地参与科学技术。研究将在现有的两个物理试验台上以不同的规模实现：照明使能系统和应用工程研究中心(LESA)的智能会议室(SCR)和协作研究增强沉浸式虚拟环境实验室(CRAIVE-Lab)，这是一个更大的空间，有一个高大的全景屏幕。作为该项目的一部分，这两个试验台将扩大，以整合合作伙伴开发的传感和计算技术。主要技术模块包括：(1)先进的飞行时间传感器，用于强大的乘员跟踪，无需摄像机或可穿戴传感器，即可获得会议所有与会者的厘米级准确实时位置；(2)定制波束形成麦克风阵列，用于声学跟踪和声源分离，允许高方向性波束指向每个与会者的瞬时位置，无需翻领或耳机麦克风，清楚地隔离他们的演讲；(3)自然语言理解算法，用于从演讲中提取知识，使系统能够学习特定于会议的术语、链接概念、评估演讲者的角色和总结讨论；以及(4)促进会议的认知计算工具，包括对参与度和生产率的评估，用于头脑风暴的思维干预，以及积极的决策支持。由此产生的服务系统将是认知物理环境，能够理解居住者的位置、移动、语音、词汇和意图。这项研究的一个关键方面是一项为期多年的研究，跟踪技术研究小组，这些小组在试验床上定期举行无脚本会议，评估服务系统的有效性。该项目的牵头机构是伦斯勒理工学院，研究人员来自电气、计算机和系统工程、计算机科学和建筑系。该奖项的工业合作伙伴是IBM Research(纽约约克敦高地的大型企业)和七角形先进微光学公司(瑞士苏黎世的大型企业)。该奖项由计算机和信息科学与工程局(CEISE)、信息和智能系统部门(IIS)以及计算机和网络系统(CNS)提供部分资金支持。

Millions of meetings take place every day in the US, incurring a tremendous cost in terms of managers' and employees' precious time and salary. Unfortunately, group meetings suffer from serious problems that undermine productivity and collegiality, including overt or unconscious bias, "groupthink", fear of speaking, and unfocused discussion. Few automatic tools exist for keeping meetings on track, accurately recording who said what, and making group discussions more productive. The goal of this research is to design intelligent rooms that provide facilitation services by identifying meeting participants, understand their conversations, summarize discussions, and help the group efficiently get through an agenda, all without requiring the participants to wear microphones or other sensors. The research will have broader impacts in several aspects. Any steps to make group meetings for complex, long-term projects more productive and easier to control would result in immediate economic impact. The success of a service system that facilitates long-term group interactions will result in a major opportunity for technology transfer and a highly marketable hardware/software platform for collaboration in domains including business, education, and finance. The project will result in new group meeting data to be used by researchers in different fields such as organizational psychologists, and computer scientists. Finally, the project will produce highly visible infrastructure for research and education that has the potential for greater public engagement with science and technology.The research will be realized at different scales in two existing physical testbeds: the Smart Conference Room (SCR) at the Engineering Research Center for Lighting Enabled Systems and Applications (LESA) and the Collaborative Research Augmented Immersive Virtual Environment Lab (CRAIVE-Lab), a much larger space with a tall, panoramic screen. Both testbeds will be expanded as part of this project to integrate sensing and computing technologies developed by the partners. The major technology modules include: (1) advanced time-of-flight sensors for robust occupant tracking, resulting in centimeter-accurate, real-time locations of all participants in the meeting without requiring video cameras or wearable sensors; (2) custom beamforming microphone arrays for acoustical tracking and sound source separation, allowing highly-directional beams to be directed at each participant's instantaneous location, clearly isolating their speech without requiring lapel or headset microphones; (3) natural language understanding algorithms for extracting knowledge from the speech, enabling the system to learn meeting-specific terminology, link concepts, assess speaker roles, and summarize discussion; and (4) cognitive computing tools for meeting facilitation, including assessments of participation and productivity, ideation interventions for brainstorming, and active decision support. The resulting service systems will be cognitive physical environments that understand their occupants' locations, movement, speech, vocabulary, and intentions. A key aspect of the research is a multi-year study that tracks technical research groups that hold regular, unscripted meetings in the testbeds, assessing the effectiveness of the service system. The lead institution for the project is Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with investigators from the departments of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering, Computer Science, and Architecture. The industrial partners in the effort are IBM Research (large business, Yorktown Heights, NY) and Heptagon Advanced MicroOptics (large business, Zurich, Switzerland).This award is partially supported by funds from the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Divisions of Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) and Computer and Network Systems (CNS).