This article presents Second Messenger, a system of dynamic awareness displays that reveal speaker participation patterns in a face-to-face discussion. The system has been used by a variety of groups during face-to-face meetings, increasing individuals ’ awareness of their own and others ’ participation in discussions. Experimental results indicate that these displays influence the amount an individual participates in a discussion and the process of information sharing used during a decision-making task. These findings suggest that awareness applications bring about systematic changes in group communication styles, highlighting the potential for such applications to be designed to improve group interactions. Joan DiMicco is an HCI researcher interested in human–human communication; she is a researcher at IBM Research in Cambridge, MA. Katherine Hollenbach is an undergraduate at MIT with an interest in computer science and design; she is an undergraduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab. Anna

Salient Stills are a class of images that reflect the aggregation of the temporal changes that occur in a moving-image sequence with the salient features of individual frames preserved. They convey the intended expression of an entire series of moving frames---a visual summary of camera and object movements. The original frames, which may include variations in focal length or field of view, or moving objects, are combined to create a single still image. The still image may have multiresolution patches, a larger field of view, or higher overall resolution than any individual frame in the original image sequence. Salient Stills may also contain selected significant objects from individual or multiple video frames. Salient Stills attempt to retain much of the original content (detail) and spatial and temporal extent (context) of the original video or film sequence.

Despite the ready availability of digital recording technology and the continually decreasing cost of digital storage, browsing audio recordings remains a tedious task. This paper presents evidence in support of a system designed to assist with information comprehension and retrieval tasks from a large collection of recorded speech. Two techniques are employed to assist users with these tasks. First, a speech recognizer creates necessarily error-laden transcripts of the recorded speech. Second, audio playback is time-compressed using the SOLAFS technique. When used together, subjects are able to perform comprehension tasks with more speed and accuracy.

During face-to-face interactions, groups frequently overly rely on the dominant viewpoint to lead the group in its decision-making process. We begin with a discussion of this phenomenon and the possibility for technology to assist in addressing it. We then present findings from a behavioral study that examines how a shared display of individual speaker-participation rates can impact the behavior of the group during a collaboration task. The results from the study indicate that the presence of such a display influences the behavior of group participants in the extremes of over and under participation. While influencing the quantity of time someone speaks is not directly equivalent to influencing the topics discussed, we suggest that this approach of providing peripheral displays of social information is promising for improving certain types of group interactions.

This paper introduces the application Second Messenger, a tool for supporting face-to-face meetings and discussions. Second Messenger uses a speech-recognition engine as an input method and outputs filtered keywords from the group's conversation onto an interactive display. The goal of this interface is to improve the quality of a group discussion by increasing the visibility of diverse viewpoints.

No abstract available.

No abstract available.