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 Agora's 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 IBM's Smart Cloud platform.

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 system's 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.

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.

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.

A composite multimedia presentation may be represented by a sequence of virtual media data packets. An algorithm is presented for ordering these virtual media data packets so as to minimize the initial delay required to transfer the composite stream from a media server to a client. This algorithm has been implemented as part of the IBM Toolkit for MPEG-4.