The widespread availability of personal mobile devices, combined with the increasing availability of stationary public devices such as large interactive displays, creates new opportunities for computer-supported collaborative work. In particular, these two factors enable the emergence of collaborative scenarios, whether planned or spontaneous, in any location, and previous obstacles to such collaborative settings such as limitations on the number of devices available for use and infrastructure costs can be overcome more easily. As hardware restrictions diminish, the need for software toolkits that simplify the development of distributed collaborative applications allowing for device heterogeneity, true multi-user interaction and spontaneous emergence increases. In this article, we describe the Toolkit for Web-based Interactive Collaborative Environments whose aim is to address these issues. This is done using current standard web technologies extended for real-time application (and structured using specific development guidelines) while ensuring compatibility with the manifold new evolutions in the currently ongoing development of open web platform (HTML5, websockets, etc). While our own work has mainly focused on synchronous co-located collaborative systems (same place/same time), our solution, the technologies used, as well as the concepts that are introduced are easily extendable for remote and/or asynchronous collaboration.

Interaction with multiple mouse pointers is becoming widespread for collocated collaboration on shared displays, but most technologies used to implement it do not support telepresent users. While web technologies are a common standard for applications that enable telepresent collaboration, they do not support the multipointer interaction needed for collaboration in collocated settings. We propose an approach to provide multipointer interaction in web applications by adding multipointer support to the web browser and addressing pointer handling in a JavaScript framework.

This paper proposes a new approach for modelling, testing and prototyping pervasive, possibly mobile, and distributed applications. It describes a set of tools aimed at supporting designers in the conceptualisation of their application and in the software development stage, and proposes a method for checking the validity of their design. The article also presents a pervasive application implemented and evaluated using our approach. It concludes with propositions for improvements in order to build a complete modelling, prototyping and testing framework for pervasive applications.

This paper presents Archivus, a multi-modal language-enabled meeting browsing and retrieval system. The prototype is in an early stage of development, and we are currently exploring the role of natural language for interacting in this relatively unfamiliar and complex domain. We briefly describe the design and implementation status of the system, and then focus on how this system is used to elicit useful data for supporting hypotheses about multimodal interaction in the domain of meeting retrieval and for developing NLP modules for this specific domain.

This thesis will investigate which modalities, and in which combinations, are best suited for use in a multimodal interface that allows users to retrieve the content of recorded and processed multimodal meetings. The dual role of multimodality in the system (present in both the interface and the stored data) poses additional challenges. We will extend and adapt established approaches to HCI and multimodality [2, 3] to this new domain, maintaining a strongly user-driven approach to design.